Your Searchable Brain

Five Web Trends To Think About

Collaborative News

We have grown accustomed to a style of reporting--the good ol' inverted pyramid delivered via byline--which has served us well for the past several decades. But we're starting to see how social software is creating a new model in which several people can organically contribute to a story. As the controversies around Wikipedia and blog reliability suggest, we're going to occasionally stumble and fall for a while until we figure out how this works, but something will emerge to challenge our notions of how news is created and dispersed.

Vlogs

Video has been the "next big thing" on the internet for nearly a decade, but we've finally reached the point where enough people are producing their own material. Everyone from my grandma to large broadcasting outlets wants to get on board. As the TV and the computer get closer to merging (via things like TiVo and Slingbox and IPTV), the stigma of online video will go away, because the transition will become seamless.

Niche News

The fragmentation we saw decades ago with the introduction of niche magazines and cable television has only become more exaggerated online. What made the internet bubble burst in 2001 was the realization that you didn't need to be gigantic to make a great product. A new class of people who have four or five different blogs on disparate niche topics is emerging. It matches perfectly with a typical news diet that can now consist of an extreme mix: a favorite vlog about your community, podcasts supporting your anarcho-political beliefs, a news aggregator with biking news, and a blog about being a daddy.

Everything Becomes Searchable

Books, TV, geography...pretty soon, your brain will become searchable.

My Media

All sectors of the culture industry have been shaken by this basic idea: People are taking control of their media. Mashups in music, memoirs in publishing, blogs in journalism, first-person shooters in gaming, reality TV in broadcasting--all of these trends have one thing in common: the rise of the individual to become owners or participants in the creation of media.

Older Brains are Trained Processors

It seems Old Brains are a misconception. Older brains do process information more slowly and take a little longer to make decisions and judgments and assimilate complex information than their younger counterparts. Older brains are less nimble, taking longer to switch from one task to another. Since in “multitasking” you are actually switching among tasks in split-second jumps, older brains don’t handle simultaneous tasks as well.

It used to be thought that normal cognitive decline occurred because of loss of neurons throughout the brain, but new techniques show that most regions hold on to their neurons with little or no loss to where memories form.

Studies comparing old and young brains show that younger brains had better recall. One third of the older brains do just as well as younger adults and showed the same pattern of focused brain activity.

A basic change the brain undergoes with age may be reversible with training, suggesting that the brains of older adults remain relatively flexible in response to training.