David Brooks gets the digital era just right. "I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more," he writes, "but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.'
Utterly true. Google's like the brain I never had, the knowledge I never acquired. Its continued existence seems utterly implausible. But so long as it's around, I don't need to really read anything. I just need to catalogue the existence of things I might one day read. I don't so much study web sites as scan for impressions, for markers, for key words I'll need if I want to return. I don't need the knowledge so much as a vague outline of what the knowledge is and how to get back. Now, if only all books were searchable on Amazon.
