on Jun 24th, 2008Web Sabbath – think most people need it
Google is giving us pond-skater minds | Andrew Sullivan – Times Online
Read this wonderful article and I realized, we are hooked to the internet!! Not a day goes by without us plugging in. The tools you work with clearly alter the way you do things and not necessarily in the right way. To give you an example, an electrician came to my place and couldn’t put a hole in a switch board because his drill bit was broken; an electrician from the pre-drill age would heat a sack needle to do the same. Did modern day tools spoil the electrician ? I would say, yes!
The same is the case with everyday programmers and web workers. I remember programming without search engines, an age where I peered through command lines and man pages to figure out why in gods name was the screen showing segmentation fault. Debugging was a very involved process, no modern day debuggers or code analyzers, just the program and console outputs. Though it sounds really painstaking ( and trust me, it was), it did make me a better programmer. I knew where not to screw up and also where things could fail. I see people start programming using IDE’s like Eclipse and Visual Studio and I really wonder whether they will ever have all the learnings that I had. Search engines and effective ones at that have paralyzed out ability to think, read and find information. Its affected us in adverse ways, so not comprehend able.
To become humans again, not impaled by search technology, I second the concept of a web sabbath. A day or two in a week, where we do not use modern day amenities like the mobile phone, Television , Internet or search. Such a day will help us to think, read, scour for knowledge the way we would have done ten years ago and hopefully that extra effort will make us think beyond technology and its limitations. I would like to hear from people who agree with me.
