The Dog Ate My Blackberry

My mobile finds "Rusty." Amazingly it works fine. At some moment I will ditch the Microsoft-Blackberry cabal and go all-Apple. Not having my Vaio for two weeks as the unit repaired for various faults one instigator (once returned from the repair shop my control-key functions inoperable - try going without cutting, pasting and printing short-cuts and not go mad. I dare you.) Apple products just plane cool is another. Who, from my era, can forget their first Mac? So simple, such love. Brown had two campus Mac stations opened, amazingly, 24-7, and always full. The worst having some deadline and being forced to wait for a computer to become available. Duane owned the first printer on my Freshman hallway which became communal and made him more popular than ever. Line-ups were often six or seven deep. Back then floppy disks ruled and could barely hold ten pages of memory. Now Students cull and synthesize Internet data, copy onto a synthetic sheet, summarise their findings in an efficient paragraph or two and submit to the prof electronically. Some credit their sources. Radical.

No doubt learning has changed since the '80s and concentration, I fear, no longer at a premium. The immediacy of Facebook, instant messaging and SMS has altered our brain functions. At least mine, anyways - while my attention span never particularly lengthy I could at least hunker down for an all-nighter. Or finish a book. Now it is difficult to reach the end of a pitch-deck. And legal documents? Oi vey. This one reason I am an entrepreneur : stim-u-lation. But also, more generally, my style of information accumulation now rewarded - quick, limited doses, everywhere all the time. And not just academics or business BTW but courtship and other human interactions. My and everybody's role to filter, digest, move on.

In '98 I met Nathan Myhrvold, then the Chief Technology Officer of Microsoft, following a speech at London college. We talked about one day planting a micro-chip in the brain "installing all human knowledge" in an instant. I smiled but thought him a bit loony. Not so now.

"Men are only as good as their technical development allows them to be."

--George Orwell