Assembly Line Minds

The world is filled with information gluttons, and so I believe that information is becoming more epidemic than academic.  It’s all at our fingertips, and we cannot help ourselves.  We copy, we paste, and the mind slips into an atrophied and apathetic state. The solution to every conceivable question or problem is nearly a mouse click away.

If you cannot find it, don’t worry…. there is good news. A group of basement analysts are working feverishly, and they will post the solution for you once complete. This very sharing of information has allowed us to make leaps and bounds where we would have otherwise been stumbling around blindly and without direction. Still, that does not mean we are exempt from the side effects…

In a thirst for immediate information, many have failed in proffering its application, sacrificing what is one of the most powerful tools we have…. the ability to make deductions based on our own observations. One piece of information now simply leads to another, starting a chain reaction, under which we no longer think for ourselves and become assembly line minds. So true, we are masters at piecing together arguments that are not our own. Working in a labor force built around the idea of specialization, one would think we would all be more aware of this inherent shortfall.

Specialization, as defined here, is a focus on, or a comparative advantage in, some particular trade, science, or art form. Any of these may require that one conduct research. And from there, the push of competitive industry drives us to retrace what members of society have already learned and created. We then fall under the spell of a defeatist mentality, causing us to under-innovate, over-analyze, and broadly generalize.

Google, a simple search engine, took a few short years to change the way we processed, well, nearly all things information. Google then became a verb in every household. If you wanted to know something, you would just Google it. This effect, the Google Complex, is characterized by a prolonged separation between information processing and the natural human ability to make logical deductions… to inspire creative solutions. I believe this disrupts a sociological evolve and is a pseudo-disorder, manifesting an entirely new argument on the distinctions between common sense, common knowledge, and intelligence.

Not only that, the efficiency of the information economy creates a disparate sense of entitlement; our new culture has grown sadly accustomed to questions already having been answered. This introduces a society spread, jack-of-all-trades phenomenon where everyone knows everything… and nothing.