On the way to the bus stop this morning, my nearly-seven-year-old
was telling me about a design for a squirrel feeder she’d devised. I was
struggling to visualize her idea involving two strings and a “plastic thing
shaped like a boat” and thought to myself “I would just google ‘squirrel
feeder’ and see what other people have already come up with.” And then I paused
for a moment and realized: the luxury of the Internet has made me mentally
lazy. Rather than come up with my own, innovative solution, I sometimes simply
refer to the ideas of other creative people and use those as springboards for
my own design. It saves me time and effort. But at what price? Could I be more innovative if I were forced to get by
without access to the wealth of human history that the Internet provides? Probably.
Which is why I kept silent and didn’t tell my child to just google it. Maybe
she really could “build a better mousetrap” if she’d never seen one before.
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it's hard to say. One of the benefits of civilization and good communication is that we don't all have to invent our own mousetrap, and sometimes a person when freed from having to do the first 10 steps can come up with an additional and genius 11th step to make a design better. There is something to be said for starting from a fresh slate, of course, but don't underrate the benefits of group problem solving either.
ReplyDeleteI do think the Internet has probably made bar conversation different. No more half-sauced, hour-long, memorable debates over whether the third actor from the left in that old movie really was the guy who's famous now - someone will just pull out their phone and look it up. Conversation over.
-Kirsten