By now, the Droid phone is firmly entrenched in my life. I use it to check email when I should be talking to people and to read Scientific American after Flame has gone to sleep. I put my card-based life-todo system online and use it through the phone, and tied it into the phone’s calendar system. It’s my phone, camera, music player, and alarm clock. I use it to tell me where the closest bagel place is, and what constellation jupiter is in tonight. I’ve started talking to it too, because the speech recognition seems almost flawless.<\/p>\n
The scary part is how integrated it is with everything at Google. I can add a new number to my phone, and it will fill in their name, email, a chat link, google map link, and whether they prefer boxers or briefs. It makes me wonder just how much of a constant companion that corporation is. My main email is @gmail, my main chat is google talk, I track my finances on Google docs, the Droid’s calendar system is just a UI wrapper on google calendar, and I’ve started doing work documentation on google wave. The Travelers Network simultaneously advertises on google, and includes google ads on it.<\/p>\n
I took the LSAT last Saturday, and we used Google’s slick navigation system to find our hour-long way there and back. A few times, the signs told us differently than Google, and Google always turned out to be right. The Droid’s orientation sensors are so good that I can use the phone like binoculars to look at a version of the sky where everything is labeled. I find myself using my eyes less and less and Google more and more.<\/p>\n
And that’s just the beginning. The Atlantic has a now-famous article Is Google Making Us Stupid?<\/a> about how Googling rewires our brains. We remember less, read more horizontally, pay attention more briefly. And every day, Google becomes bigger, and plays a more definitive role in our actions. Some day, about three 530 million years ago, single celled bacteria realized that they had become pawns in a game controlled by the multi-cellulars. Now our day has come: our lives play out as mere biological aides and ironically the links that chain us to our new role are our cells.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By now, the Droid phone is firmly entrenched in my life. I use it to check email when I should be talking to people and to read Scientific American after Flame has gone to sleep. I put my card-based life-todo system online and use it through the phone, and tied it into the phone’s calendar … Continue reading A Google Life<\/span>