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What’s happening to us? Data deluge will reboot our brains
12.17.2009
09:02 pm
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I once had the good fortune to meet Ed “Big Daddy” Roth, the creator of the Rat Fink character and “low brow” artist/custom car god, at a hot rod show in Englishtown, NJ. It was in the early 90s and over dinner Roth told my colleague and me that his grandchildren had no interest in books or reading, all they cared about were their video games (keep in mind that owning a home computer was not all that commonplace of a thing then). My work associate shook her head in dismay and said “That’s just sad. That really depresses me” to which Roth just laughed and replied “That’s how people felt when hieroglyphics went out of style. Then the next thing came and it was good, too. There will always be new things. That’s just the way it is. “

As you might imagine, I’ve pulled that anecdote out more than a couple of times since…

Is the ‘new thing’ though, always necessarily going to be good? The invention of the printing press, as important as it certainly was, took a long, long time to have a profound effect on society. The Internet and smart phones took over almost instantaneously, in comparison. From the Times of London:

The speed of modern life is 2.3 words per second, or about 100,000 words a day. That is the verbiage bombarding the average person in the 12 hours they are typically awake and ?

Posted by Richard Metzger
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12.17.2009
09:02 pm
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