Thinking in References
A funny thing happened to me on Facebook recently. After struggling for about 37 minutes to come up with a status message of pure hilarity, I finally opted to put in a bunch of characters that you get when you hold down shift and furiously hit the numbers at the top of your keyboard. It made it look like I was saying something full of expletives, but they were left to the imagination of the reader. Now that's comedy gold.
A few people might have read it, but only one person posted a reply: a link to a YouTube video by a band called Sons of Butcher aptly named "Fuck the Shit". The song is about a minute and the lyrics are only these three words. (with a few variations in tense) I have to admit after clicking on this video I laughed a lot harder than I'd like to admit. It's crude, yes, but what I was really laughing at was how uniquely witty this reply to my status message was.
Think about it: his reply was a hyperlink to a video somewhere on the Internet. People can talk in hyperlinks. One person can post a link to a news article, and others can post a response, which might even take the form of another news article or a video that counters the original post. Entire discussions can be had, and people can express themselves without composing a single word.
Now, people referencing other material to express themselves is not new. Books have been around for centuries, and people often point to them, quoting lines from classic works to reinforce their own point or express something succinctly. People carry around signs, wear shirts, and carve graffiti all over everything that reads "John 3:16", a verse that I still have never bothered to look up, and that's really just pointing to something else in order to express...uh, something, without finding the words for yourself.
But the world of a century ago, where the well-educated in society, those who were fortunate enough to be able to read and owned shelves of books, sat around talking about the world's great literature or the importance of implementing eugenics, is a far cry from the world of social bookmarking of today. We can favorite things on del.icio.us, sharing our thoughts and opinions with other people without needing to write a single word. In fact, what in the bloody hell am I doing on here? There must be another article out there making this exact point someplace...I should have found it and just bookmarked it, dammit, and then I could be sleeping instead of beating my tired head against this whole idea.
But this is one thing that has made us more efficient, as far as human beings go. We store references to information instead of the information itself. This is incredibly efficient for memory, which is something of a finite resource. This is something that computers have been taking advantage of for years. In the C language, there is something called a pointer, which is nothing more than variable that points to another variable. It doesn't hold a value, but the location of another variable and its value.
Here's another way to think of it. I'm currently in the last two weeks of my current job. I've put in my notice. This is something that most of the people I work with don't know yet. The management at my company prefers not to tell people when a person resigns, and I haven't figured out why yet. Frankly, I could care less. Chances are, a couple of them might be on here reading this right now, learning for the first time that, yes, I am leaving my job. Sorry. In any case, I've only got a few days left, and I've mostly checked out. My co-workers still ask for my help and try to explain their problems to me and, like the dutiful person who has no vested interest in the issues anymore, my eyes glaze over and my brain drifts off, akin to Homer's brain when Ned Flanders tried to explain how he distinguishes apple juice from cider. Your brain might have done this same thing a paragraph ago when I brought up the C programming language.
But when my boss comes over and asks a question, and bear in mind that they know that I'm leaving, I point right to somebody else, someone working next to me, and insist that they have the answer. Or that they should figure it out. I point elsewhere. I don't have the answer, but I sure know where you can find it! I have no incentive to do the work, and can't benefit from it, but someone else can! I'm such a swell guy!
Much like my stupid example which I worked into this post solely to mention that I'm leaving my job, people think in references because they're lazy. It's simply more efficient to remember where you read something than to remember what you read. And the Internet makes everything we read available to all of us very quickly, much easier than books. This is why people think in URLs, or little searches on their favorite sites. If I asked you to show me a video of something you liked, how many of you would fire up a browser and type something into YouTube? Maybe you have it bookmarked. You know right where to go. Imagine if one day YouTube came offline for any reason...how many broken links would there be sitting in your head? Things you used to know how to find easily, but now you've got to find some other video site, figure out how it works, and hopefully they have the same video you saw before.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the reasons that the Bible was so successful. Sure, I understand its content has value, and its wide proliferation is also a critical player, I'm not disputing that...but look at the thing. The whole thing is divided into small, manageable chunks that can easily be referenced by a name and two numbers. It's very easy to take one of these chunks, put it on your AIM profile (does anyone actually use those things anymore?), and anyone who reads it can pick up a Bible and easily jump right to the place you took it from and start reading. Maybe someone posted a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was interesting. Even if I can figure out that it was in The Great Gatsby, it's still way too hard for me to find the quote someplace in the whole godforsaken book.
The bible makes it easy to reference, and this plays on how the human brain operates very well. We don't absorb all of the information we're exposed to; we index it. In the face of all this new technology we're somehow trying to adapt to, our brains are twitchy electrical bundles of pointers and references to information, taking the form of Google searches that will take us to all kinds of garbage residing in the bowels of the Internet. I often wonder if this easy access to information is making us any stupider...maybe a link to the answer just isn't as good as the answer itself. I wouldn't want to be in a doctor's office being diagnosed by some guy in a white coat poking around on WebMD on his iPhone. You might as well set me up with the incompetent boob and the three probe machine from the movie Idiocracy.
A few people might have read it, but only one person posted a reply: a link to a YouTube video by a band called Sons of Butcher aptly named "Fuck the Shit". The song is about a minute and the lyrics are only these three words. (with a few variations in tense) I have to admit after clicking on this video I laughed a lot harder than I'd like to admit. It's crude, yes, but what I was really laughing at was how uniquely witty this reply to my status message was.
Think about it: his reply was a hyperlink to a video somewhere on the Internet. People can talk in hyperlinks. One person can post a link to a news article, and others can post a response, which might even take the form of another news article or a video that counters the original post. Entire discussions can be had, and people can express themselves without composing a single word.
Now, people referencing other material to express themselves is not new. Books have been around for centuries, and people often point to them, quoting lines from classic works to reinforce their own point or express something succinctly. People carry around signs, wear shirts, and carve graffiti all over everything that reads "John 3:16", a verse that I still have never bothered to look up, and that's really just pointing to something else in order to express...uh, something, without finding the words for yourself.
But the world of a century ago, where the well-educated in society, those who were fortunate enough to be able to read and owned shelves of books, sat around talking about the world's great literature or the importance of implementing eugenics, is a far cry from the world of social bookmarking of today. We can favorite things on del.icio.us, sharing our thoughts and opinions with other people without needing to write a single word. In fact, what in the bloody hell am I doing on here? There must be another article out there making this exact point someplace...I should have found it and just bookmarked it, dammit, and then I could be sleeping instead of beating my tired head against this whole idea.
But this is one thing that has made us more efficient, as far as human beings go. We store references to information instead of the information itself. This is incredibly efficient for memory, which is something of a finite resource. This is something that computers have been taking advantage of for years. In the C language, there is something called a pointer, which is nothing more than variable that points to another variable. It doesn't hold a value, but the location of another variable and its value.
Here's another way to think of it. I'm currently in the last two weeks of my current job. I've put in my notice. This is something that most of the people I work with don't know yet. The management at my company prefers not to tell people when a person resigns, and I haven't figured out why yet. Frankly, I could care less. Chances are, a couple of them might be on here reading this right now, learning for the first time that, yes, I am leaving my job. Sorry. In any case, I've only got a few days left, and I've mostly checked out. My co-workers still ask for my help and try to explain their problems to me and, like the dutiful person who has no vested interest in the issues anymore, my eyes glaze over and my brain drifts off, akin to Homer's brain when Ned Flanders tried to explain how he distinguishes apple juice from cider. Your brain might have done this same thing a paragraph ago when I brought up the C programming language.
But when my boss comes over and asks a question, and bear in mind that they know that I'm leaving, I point right to somebody else, someone working next to me, and insist that they have the answer. Or that they should figure it out. I point elsewhere. I don't have the answer, but I sure know where you can find it! I have no incentive to do the work, and can't benefit from it, but someone else can! I'm such a swell guy!
Much like my stupid example which I worked into this post solely to mention that I'm leaving my job, people think in references because they're lazy. It's simply more efficient to remember where you read something than to remember what you read. And the Internet makes everything we read available to all of us very quickly, much easier than books. This is why people think in URLs, or little searches on their favorite sites. If I asked you to show me a video of something you liked, how many of you would fire up a browser and type something into YouTube? Maybe you have it bookmarked. You know right where to go. Imagine if one day YouTube came offline for any reason...how many broken links would there be sitting in your head? Things you used to know how to find easily, but now you've got to find some other video site, figure out how it works, and hopefully they have the same video you saw before.
I'm pretty sure this is one of the reasons that the Bible was so successful. Sure, I understand its content has value, and its wide proliferation is also a critical player, I'm not disputing that...but look at the thing. The whole thing is divided into small, manageable chunks that can easily be referenced by a name and two numbers. It's very easy to take one of these chunks, put it on your AIM profile (does anyone actually use those things anymore?), and anyone who reads it can pick up a Bible and easily jump right to the place you took it from and start reading. Maybe someone posted a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald that was interesting. Even if I can figure out that it was in The Great Gatsby, it's still way too hard for me to find the quote someplace in the whole godforsaken book.
The bible makes it easy to reference, and this plays on how the human brain operates very well. We don't absorb all of the information we're exposed to; we index it. In the face of all this new technology we're somehow trying to adapt to, our brains are twitchy electrical bundles of pointers and references to information, taking the form of Google searches that will take us to all kinds of garbage residing in the bowels of the Internet. I often wonder if this easy access to information is making us any stupider...maybe a link to the answer just isn't as good as the answer itself. I wouldn't want to be in a doctor's office being diagnosed by some guy in a white coat poking around on WebMD on his iPhone. You might as well set me up with the incompetent boob and the three probe machine from the movie Idiocracy.