I keep thinking about my delight in using the iPhone's Googlemaps application today as I drove Chloe to see her agent in Bellevue. The GPS got us there flawlessly. Chloe kept rolling her eyes and saying "yes, this is amazing to YOU, but to people MY age this is just normal."
What has happened here? We have shifted from a paradigm where information was once scarce, and therefore often hoarded, to one where information is fluid and without borders. The implications are profound. If we are free to share information (and Googlemaps isn't really as good an example of this as Google itself, or Wikis, or Blogs, but I am easily dazzled by technology--) then we are free to benefit from the accelerated learning that surely must come from that. From the distributed intelligence that we share. Now that we are sharing it.
We are not all sharing it. There are still many holdouts, hoarders and guarders who believe that their worth depends on keeping hold of their little corner of data. But these people will likely be lost in the shadow of what is built by those who understand that sharing benefits all of us because the synergystic results are far better than the sum of their separate parts.
The Australian Aborigines have a saying: The more you know, the less you need. I like to think of this as I enter into this world of fluid information sharing.
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Great points on the generational shift, my two year old fearlessly pushes buttons on our computer and every remote in the house till she likes what happens. I remember using a cassette to save my programming on a commodore 64, don't miss it! Your quote reminds me of a Native American quote, 'All knowledge is known, we just need to open our eyes.' I see your ideas resonating in that idea.
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