[keiferski]

For the impatient, skip to the end of the article.

It is the connection between memory and creativity, perhaps, which should make us most wary of the web. ‘As our use of the web makes it harder for us to lock information into our biological memory, we’re forced to rely more and more on the net’s capacious and easily searchable artificial memory,’ Carr observes. But conscious manipulation of externally stored information is not enough to yield the deepest of creative breakthroughs: this is what the example of Poincaré suggests. Human memory, unlike machine memory, is dynamic. Through some process we only crudely understand – Poincaré himself saw it as the collision and locking together of ideas into stable combinations – novel patterns are unconsciously detected, novel analogies discovered. And this is the process that Google, by seducing us into using it as a memory prosthesis, threatens to subvert.

[knome]

They also point out how difficult it is to keep abreast of the increasing amount of information humanity is generating, and how the Internet assists in rapidly accessing this information. It seems that if ingenuity requires vast knowledge of disparate topics, trolling through the Internet's wide seas of information would be only beneficial to the cause, giving ever larger sets of ideas for mental recombination. I expect creativity will weather this age without tarnish.