Back in the early days of blogging it used to feel as if the internet was an extension of my neural networks. My blog posts would trigger responses which I would then react to. It was as if some synapses fired inside my skull, while others fired outside it. Cory Doctorow called this his outboard brain.
Well, nowadays it feels like I’ve had an aneurysm! The synapses outside my skull are malfunctioning. Some are dying off and others are overheating.
Maybe I need to step back from this synaptic dysfunction – meditation to calm my outboard brain. Maybe I need a frontal lobotomy.
The Obvious? 
Worrying thought, eh? I sometimes think that we are dysfunctionally dependent on our devices i.e. our outboard brains. We back them up in our cloud brain just in case the outboard brain fails. Is the outboard brain a different self?
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It certainly relates to my previous post about the challenge of being yourself.
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I found Robert Winter’s post about Memex helped my thinking in this area.
https://robert.winter.ink/intellectual-warehouse/
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Really interesting post. Thanks Duncan. As I have written elsewhere I rarely go back and read my blog, and have long ago given up trying to keep up with the vast amounts of information available to us in even narrow fields of interest but I liked the last couple of paragraphs:
“Winston Churchill once observed:
we shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us
In a sense, the bloggerverse works in the same way. We shape our blogs and afterwards our blogs shape us.”
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I’d recommend reading How Buildings Learn by Stewart Brand.
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I managed the editors who edited the BBC TV programme based on it in the nineties!
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