My head is in the cloud

Dave Pell has an insightful and personally disturbing (for me!) post over on Tweetage Wasteland about how we have become so accustomed to our computers, our smartphones, and the internet managing all of our personal information that we can no longer do it for ourselves.

Driving the point home, this passage:

Recently, our babysitter was struck by a car just a few steps from our front door. Luckily, none of her injuries were life threatening. Her cell phone, however, was brutalized beyond recognition.

Before heading to the emergency room, I climbed into the back of the ambulance where I asked her if she wanted me to call her boyfriend. She said she did, but she didn’t know his telephone number. It was lost along with her now obliterated cell phone, and she had never committed the number to memory.

At first, I was shocked. How could she possibly not know her own boyfriend’s telephone number? It must have been the trauma of being hit by a car. But then I thought about it for a few seconds, and I realized that – without pulling out my iPhone – I don’t know her telephone number either.

Aside from a few numbers I have known most of my life, I know almost none of my friends contact information. As Dave says:

Now, after a few years of this, I realize that when I look up from the screen I know almost nothing. And maybe that would be fine if the absent phone numbers and upcoming dates were freeing space for deeper and more introspective thought. But I sense that my addiction to the realtime stream is only making room for the consumption of a faster stream.

Excellent read at the link.

Found via: Coudal Partners

Image lifted from: Greg Verdino's blog with no attribution.