CNN reports where the Internet-enabled, laptop-toting children of today, the Generation I if you will, have made technology as indispensible extensions of themselves. Nothing new here: Marshall McLuhan postulated that computers would amplify humanistic intelligence, in the same way that sliderules and calculators augment our mathematic skills.
Steve Mann of the University of Toronto took the extension theory to its logical extreme by augmenting himself with a series of wearable computers and cameras that allow him to interact with and record his surroundings.
As usual, the kids figured it out first. The computer isn’t just a grey box in the living room for surfing eBay: it’s a familiar that connects and enriches their very lives.
Where information is free and readily available, it has increasingly become a world where it’s not what you know, but where to find it, how to interpret it, and who to talk to. The ability to forge relationships (both in the causal and social sense) becomes even more precious.