It is commonly thought that our psychological sense of time is different from “objective time” as timed by the clock. But that is not true. What happens is that as we live longer, we can remember more (if we are alert and retain consciousness). The ability to scan more events in our past in one minute or even in 30 seconds gives us the sense that time has speeded up. But it is not true. A day is just as long for me as for you.
Another thought on this: for those whose day is busy, the day whizzes by as they go from event to event. For someone retired and without activities to keep them busy, the day drags on and on. In this sense, psychological time is different from real time. But really, all of this is a matter of semantics – and above all, we must be aware of the power of the human mind.
The internet has revolutionized learning. But the mind has not changed. We must be consciously aware of what the internet does to us, so that we can use it properly and profitably. Two major studies have been done on the Internet’s affect on our minds:
Nicholas Carr: The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to our Minds.,
Mary Anne Wolf: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
These two eminent researchers can be heard at the following links:
Nicholas Carr: What the Internet is Doing to our minds
Nicholas Carr: Is the Internet Making Us Stupid?
Mary Anne Wolf: Speaks on :Dyslexia
Both Nicholas Carr and Marry Anne Wolf give us essential insights, as parents and actors in the real world, to help us navigate life in the Internet Age. We are given the chance to monitor our own activities to ensure they are not self-destructive of ourselves or of others. We especially do not want to sacrifice the quality of family life with our children for an obsession with the internet.
The internet makes it possible for each one of us to range the world in seconds – much the same way we used to reminisce and recall past events in our lives. But this ability to roam and explore should not crowd out the ability to read deeply (see The Juggler’s Brain), or participate in life’s activities.
This site, http://parkoffletter.com, is devoted to the idea that the Internet is a learning instrument. It can be fun and entertaining and at the same time it can accelerate our learning into areas that have hitherto been closed to us. The idea here is focus. So much has been uploaded to the Internet that our attention can be splattered in one hundred directions. In the Yeshiva or the Study Hall (especially with David Hume), so we can focus intently on a problem. You will not be able to learn Euclidean or Non-Euclidean Geometry with a splattered mind. Nor will you ever have a chance to decipher Godel’s Theorem. Nor will you learn to play the Cello.
So what is the proper place for the internet in our explorations? and how judiciously should it be used? The answers to these questions will each be personal solutions. This site is meant to give you one path that hopefully will be fruitful and rewarding. It is based on the observation that Videos and especially You-Tube dominate the Internet. There are hundreds and perhaps thousands of videos that are well made and worthwhile, in terms of education, learning, and travel. How do we locate them?
Consider the observation which GoogleCEO Eric Schmidt told the audience at the 2010 Techonomy Conference in Lake Tahoe: “The world is not ready for the technology revolution that will be happening to them relatively soon. One, because people don’t understand what is going to happen and two, because of the compounding effect that is occurring. Between the dawn of civilization through 2003, there was just five exabytes of information created. That much information is now created every two days, and the pace is increasing. No wonder we are sort of over-loaded. People aren”t ready for the technology revolution that’s going to happen to them. The real issue is user-generated content. People are describing enormous amounts of things abut themselves on video and photographs and so forth..If you take the combination of power laws plus optionality around choices and absolute scale, then you get the chaotic nature of what we are all doing.”
Click here to see that conference.
Jeff Pulver, an early investor in Vonage says: “Living and experiencing information in The Now is just different when compared to the way we are used t experience things. Since the launch of the commercial internet in 1993, we may have been on-line in real-time, but we experienced access to information that was slightly old to ancient. Today access to information has changed so much in the past year that today we are now living in “the State of Now.” The Web is moving in real time: what happens now is delivered now.
The Parkoffletter.com has been constructed on the presumption that the Internet needs an editor. In fact, it requires thousands of editors, to sift out the good content from the bad content, the worthwhile from the irrelevant and less than relevant. This is the same process that an editor of a book, or of a compilation of scholarly articles does. In my Philosophy 101 Book of Readings, 30 articles were inserted in a specific order, under five different categories. The student perhaps never realized how important the editorial function was in creating that book. But it was essential to create the book.
Unless you want to spend your time doing your own search, through Google and You-Tube, if you can find a good editor (curator), then you should rely on him and others like him.
Travel with me and view The Discovery of Ancient Egypt. I tell a story here, mainly through video, because the story has been told already, only you may never find it if you are not looking for it. Take a trip to Israel to see Made in Israel. You may take your own trip to Israel and tour the entire country and not see what you will see here in these short videos.
Come travel with me, in time and in place, and see the world that was and the world that is.
Gerald Parkoff