Das Praktische, das Theoretische und das Kulturkritische gehören für Gelernter zusammen. „Es scheint mir wichtig, dass die Bürger ihre Hände nicht in technologischer Unschuld waschen. Viele erklären zu schnell: Ich verstehe diese Technologie nicht. Ich gebe mir aber auch keine Mühe, sie zu verstehen.“ Die Chancen einer solchen Anstrengung beurteilt er allerdings skeptisch: „Früher musste man einmal wissen, wo man welche Informationen findet. Was sich aber mühelos bekommen lässt, ist in den Augen anderer nichts wert. Wenn es mich nur ein paar Tastaturanschläge kostet, Wissen zu beschaffen, schätze ich es anders, als wenn ich erst nachdenken muss, wo ich es herbekomme. Womöglich hätte ich mit jemandem gesprochen oder ein Buch gelesen, das mich auf Dinge bringt, die ich gar nicht gesucht habe. Wie viele Studenten sagen sich heute: Um Himmels Willen, ich will gleich zum richtigen Absatz kommen, ich will mich nicht vom ganzen Buch ablenken lassen. Der Weg des geringsten Widerstands bringt zwar oft die größte wirtschaftliche Produktivität, aber er ist gefährlich für die Menschheit.“

I suppose other creatures use their environment for storing information, or programming their brains in limited ways. But I assume humans export the highest percentage of brain function to their environment, and it grows daily. The evolution of mind from inside the creature to outside the body fascinates me. Humans are turning the entire planet into an exobrain. Our brains can't hold all of the data we produce, so we look for ways to offload to books, websites, music, and architecture, to name a few storage devices. And we manipulate the environment to reprogram our brains as needed.

Author Scott Adams on the phenomenon of manipulating our environment to extend our brains.

It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.

The new media have caught on for a reason. Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is the author of “The Stuff of Thought.”

The rise of streaming tools, though, is leading to a new state, where long-format blogging is being imploded, turned into content for the short-format stream, like radio was cannibalized for TV.

We'll see a new logical layering. At the bottom will be the web of pages, a vast archive of HTML connected by links: a giant hypertext.

At the top will be the web of flow, as typified now by Twitter microstreaming. Users will consider themsleves as 'logged into' Twitter (or other microstreams) where microsyntactic references, via URLs, hashtags, or other techniques will allow users to pull in larger format or richer content, like text, audio, video, or images. This is where people will operate, share, comment, question, and argue converationally.

Drei Dinge seien ihm wichtig: "Der Return on Investment, der Flow - also dass wir uns wohlfühlen - und eine gute Lernkurve.

Have you ever had a creative evening when time suddenly flew by? A day when you executed a difficult project at work flawlessly? A brief moment in time when your challenging exercise routine felt effortless?

All of these times you were in a state of flow.

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?" Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

In his seminal pop-book, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi argued that people are happiest when they can reach a state of "flow." He talks about performers and athletes who are in the height of their profession, the experience they feel as time passes by and everything just clicks. People reach a state where attention appears focused and, simultaneously, not in need of focus at the same time. The world is aligned and everything just feels right.