On Steve Jobs & The Internet

08 Dec 2014

Tags: apple steve jobs

Interesting quote from Steve Jobs at 9to5Mac

We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Steve was an interesting sort because while he had strong opinions, he also didn’t hold many of them sacred. He was quite willing to take the aforementioned opinion and dump it the moment he was given information that contradicted it.

That was clearly the case when Google was a launch partner on the iPhone. By that point, Apple had realized that not only did people use the web for information, it had become a form of external memory. When was the last time you hopped to google for a little tidbit of information, such as how many kilometers in a mile? (2.64 btw) How many times have you done that?

We externalize parts of our memory store in the web and technology now, for good or ill.