I did not have the (regular) Internet since Wednesday because my cable was down. All delights of interaction with Time Warner customer service aside, this mild annoyance made me realize something else. The fact that I could not have the access to new information was in fact less important than the fact that my brain did not work as it usually does. Significant parts of my cognition, attention, and perception went off together with the cable access. Being online is the intrinsic part of my thought process, turns out. My thinking is distributed between my brain and technology = tools & material devices that I use in my thought process. I am not really that psyched to admit that I am, in fact, a cyborg, but it seems that way. Which reminded me of Andy Clark and his idea of extended mind. I read Clark's book "Natural Born Cyborgs" some years back, and this situation reminded me of his idea of dynamic loops between our brains, bodies, and environments (there is ton of awesome examples of this dynamic loop in his book. highly recommended). But the idea of distributed cognition actually belongs to cognitive anthropologist Edwin Hutchins, who studied how pilots operate in cockpits (and how, for the love of god, can they keep track of all these simultaneously operating instruments).
In any event, I think that my poor state of temporary cognitive darkness also can refer to distributed attention. What people today in fact might be experiencing is not an attention deficit, but its distribution across many different information streams. Which is not necessarily a bad thing because our brain becomes much much bigger than it would ever be able to fit in our scull. Unless ... um, it doesn't matter. If writing helps us think and communicate more clearly then Twitter, Facebook, RSS, Google Reader, blogs, etc. help us perceive more, think better, solve more complex problems, and get more refined feedback to our actions. But we don't really just "use" those tools, neither they are just our "extensions". They are materialization of our thoughts, and it's not easy to tell when we end and technology starts. (Creepy). But without these tools, we are really condemned to our own [limited] cognitive devices. I love being a cyborg. :)
