Blog #3: Media Literacy

Distributed Cognition

As the amount of information that human society has discovered grows faster and faster it becomes more and more impossible for any person to know everything. People are starting to turn towards the Internet as a sort of secondary mind, and I do not see that there is any problem with that. Why should we be memorizing data just in case it may be useful one day? Would it not be better to teach people how to find data if they need it? If that data becomes useful to know internally then it will be memorized so that the process of looking it up every time can be avoided. I know my social security number and my credit card numbers by heart, but that is not because I memorized them when I got them. I learned them as I used them.

Distributed Cognition is part of the cognitive sciences and is a theory that the “mind” is not 100% in the body. Take a process as simple as a really long math problem. To finish the problem takes many steps and we use a system on paper to work one step at a time. Therefore the cognition is both inside our mind and on the paper. Sure the paper is just a storage device but think about how much harder you would have had to work if you had no paper at all to do the problem. The paper helped you remember so it was part of your mental processes. It may not be smart, but with the paper we are smarter.

Getting Things Done is basically a time management system so that you can keep all your tasks in line, but the philosophy at the heart of it is to basically extend your cognition of tasks into a system of paper or software. When you start on the system you write down all of the tasks, promises, deadlines and other to-dos and get them into one big pile. Then you sort though that pile adding dates due, resources needed and projects they are a part of. Then you create filters so that you are working on what you need to be working on. This part is all pretty typical of time management but it’s the other part that I find fascinating. As you are working on anything, if your mind presents you with an interesting side idea or something that you need to do then you are to immediately create a new item in your system and place it in your inbox. This combined with the regular sorting of the inbox means that you will never lose track of your ideas and obligations. That you have created a system to extend the memory capacity of the human brain.

http://www.learning-theories.com/distributed-cognition-dcog.html

http://www.davidco.com/what_is_gtd.php