It is in our dance with the Internet that we hold the prospect of relying on a helpmate to engage the pure process of accommodation. It is the Internet that can provide us with clean, nonmodified information from the past – what we human beings call “memory.” The Internet is the Engram for which Lashley searched. What this means is that we can concentrate on other matters rather than always having to hold on to details. We don’t have to be a Teddy Nadler, but can instead be adaptive, creative and successful negotiators of a world that wants us to assimilate as well as accommodate. We now have an information bank on the Internet that is equivalent to having full access to the US Library of Congress. What a gift – and what a challenge. We enter the Library of Congress and don’t even know where to begin in searching for some relevant information.
This is where our life is truly being changed by the Internet. Put simply, we are becoming not the archivists (holders of information), but rather the Locators. We are becoming the knowledgeable and helpful staff members who great us when we enter the Library. They help us locate the information we need by pointing us to the card catalog or (more recently) to the computer that we can access in order to find the location of the book, magazine or video that will be of greatest help to us.
Today, we no longer need the assistance of the library staff as we enter the digital (rather than physical) library. Rather, we are assisted by search engines that are becoming increasingly sophisticated. We are beginning to rely on these search engines and are becoming more knowledgeable and skillful in dancing with these search engines. The term now being bandied about is “The Google Effect’). This effect is becoming a big deal in our 21st Century lives.
The Internet of Exposition
While the Internet is a source of essentially non-changing information for our use, it is also a tool for assisting with our dynamic and creative processing of this information. We don’t need the Internet to help us with our procedural memory – though the new self-driving cars will be taken over our procedural memory (a topic for one of our future essays on human-embedded technologies). It is in the selection of relevant information that we are most beholding to the Internet.
One of my colleagues, David Halliburton, who tragically passed away several years ago (having served in seven academic departments at Stanford University) noted that the term “information Sciences” points to a plurality of “sciences.” He noted that we have been quite successful in creating a science of information generation—but have not been as successful in creating the “sciences” or information retrieval and interpretation. Now, in the 2020s we are getting better at the science of information retrieval—but still are having a hard time figuring out how to interpret and find meaning in the information we have retrieved.
