With so much information at our disposal it is no longer necessary or recommended to try to remember anything.

"It's true we don't remember anything anymore, but we don't need to," said Hawkins, the co-founder of Palm Computing and author of a book called "On Intelligence."

"We might one day sit around and reminisce about having to remember phone numbers, but it's not a bad thing. It frees us up to think about other things. The brain has a limited capacity, if you give it high-level tools, it will work on high-level problems," he said.

I was curious to discover some of the high level problems that we as americans wish to investigate. Luckily for us access points in the form of search engines have narrowed down the vastness of the information into filtered results based on requested data. Lets see what information and problem solving has been retrieved.

I started with the #1 search engine Google Inc. Their web site, google.com, has a tracking page called Google Zietgeist. This should give some information on what hungry minds wish to learn. After careful scrutinization I came to the conclusion that tabloid fodder and entertainment news seem to monopolize the information searches. Maybe this is just the audience that is attracted to google.com.

Lets go to a competitor Yahoo! Inc and see how there powerful search portal is being utilized. It was refreshing to see the amount of effort that Yahoo! puts into tracking and reporting the traffic to their site. They have dedicated a whole sub-domain to their efforts. Yahoo! Buzz tracks all of the movers in search activity. Today's top mover is the news on the death of one of our most talented thespians, Thomas Bond. This and other entertainment gossip seem to proliferate the activity of this powerful networking machine we call the world wide web.

I'm pretty sure Dr. Bush's vision of how to use this powerful machine differs from how it exists today but there are positives to this new tool. No longer do we need to pick up a news paper or ask a friend who won the game last night, we can have the score text messaged to our phone. With the growth of online communities and Blogs we no longer need to leave the house to meet new people and make friends. Even our love lives can be arranged by an online dating service.

With these modern advances one has to wonder what lies ahead. As the machine develops access points that are smaller and smaller and we continue to refer to them as devices or appliances the integration should be pretty smooth. Soon will be the day when we no longer need to search out a physical portal, sit in front of it and type into a clumsy keyboard. It will be integrated into our very being whether through our cloths, implants or whatever new advancements we have yet to consider. This all may seem a little scary but as long as Pamala Anderson remains on the Lycos 50 Elite, everything should be just fine.

Google Zeitgeist
Top Gaining Queries
Week Ending
September 19, 2005
1. kenny chesney
2. kate moss
3. britney spears baby
4. nintendo revolution
5. hurricane rita
6. luciana barroso
7. advent children
8. renee zellweger
9. emmys
10. survivor guatemala

MORE »

Originally written for:

September 27, 2005
MD23: Theories of Electronic Communications II
Sean Carton