The other day at work Minor Threat’s “In My Eyes” came on the ipod. While listening I knew I had heard a cover of this song recently but couldn’t remember who. However, I didn’t fret; as James Fallows wrote in the most recent Atlantic Monthly:
“In one way I know of, the Internet has improved my personality. In the olden days, I would get annoyed (and show it) when I heard a song I knew but couldn’t remember who was singing, or when I channel surfed across an old movie and wondered who a familiar-looking character actor was (who is the creepy guy who tussles with Patrick Swayze on the subway in Ghost?). The question would lodge in my brain and make me cranky until the answer popped up hours or days later, or until I forgot about it. Now, if I’m at a computer, I can scratch the mental itch in seconds . . . . The most obvious and unquestionable achievement in Internet “intelligence” is the Jeopardy!-style retrieval of “spot knowledge” . . . . If omnipresent retrieval of spot data means there’s less we have to remember, and if categorization systems do some of the first-stage thinking for us, what will happen to our brains?”
So I knew a quick search (or just sorting everything on the ipod by song name) would get me an answer. Not necessary in this case because later, while in an elevator, I remembered that the cover was by Rage Against the Machine on their cover album Renegades. So does this mean that my brain is still stuck in first-stage (un-evolved) thinking? Is it relegated to mere information-retrieval, while the internets free up the rest of humanity for higher-level thinking?
The answer is that the best song on that album is the version of “Maggie’s Farm”, of course. And that the title of this post was the sender name on some spam I got today.
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