Is Print As We Know it, Dead? Can We Still Make Decisions Without Twitter?

I ask this question not because it’s a original question anymore, but because I seriously want to know what people think. I can’t tell you the last time I’ve read something that was more then 25 pages. And I’m not talking about books. I still read the occasional fiction book (I won’t get into the fact that I haven’t EVER finished a book in my life, that’s another post.)

For the last two years, I haven’t bought any instructional materials about software. Everything’s been online. EVERYTHING. If I can’t search for something in five minutes, I say it’s not worth it. My time is too hyper sped up, too filled to spend the time to scan through a book to find a specific piece of text.

Now, I will be first in line when we’re able to get neural implants and have the ability to have ocr in our head. But until that time, give me a Diet Dr. Pepper, the newest copy of wired, and a terabyte of searchable music streaming from my laptop into my Xbox and I’m good to go.

But, I digress. I think that this fascination with things getting quicker, or the hive mind can be dangerous.

Think about it. My parents are coming to visit in a few weeks. Instead of searching for things to do in Pittsburgh, I twitted about it, which got pushed to my facebook, which got pushed to 450 people, and I then got 15 responses. So I feel like I’m even past the post of searching.

Are we (or I should say me.) going to get to the point where knowledge becomes not what we know… but what the collective knows? To me, that is a little scary. Gone will be experts, technicians and monocle wearing socialites. In with the Matrix style downloading of martial arts programs and cooking tech wet ware.

I guess we’ll know in a few years…. if we keep going in the direction we are, and if we all know what everyone else is doing, then we won’t really have a need to talk to anyone anymore.

We’ll know if we’ve gone too far if we see this guy coming after us.

Lookout Bro.... Look.... Out....