From Vanderleun, this Smithsonian article about imposing virtual maps on sensory input:
Hold an electronic tablet up as you walk along a street, and it will show an annotated overlay of the real street ahead—where the clean restrooms are, which stores sell your favorite items, where your friends are hanging out. Computer chips are becoming so small, and screens so thin and cheap, that in the next 40 years semitransparent eyeglasses will apply an informational layer to reality. If you pick up an object while peering through these spectacles, the object’s (or place’s) essential information will appear in overlay text. In this way screens will enable us to “read” everything, not just text. Last year alone, five quintillion (10 to the power of 18) transistors were embedded into objects other than computers. Very soon most manufactured items, from shoes to cans of soup, will contain a small sliver of dim intelligence, and screens will be the tool we use to interact with this transistorized information.
iPhone already has apps that create overlays on reality in very handy ways. One is an app that listens to a song on the radio and tells you what it is, which I consider pure magic I've been waiting for all my life. Even better, there is an app that can identify a tune that's being hummed in the roughest and most incompetent way.
I thought there was another app that lets you point the screen at the night sky and see a superimposed constellation map, but it turns out it really uses your GPS-determined location to load a map of the sky you ought to be looking at, rather operating directly off of the visual input. Pretty nifty anyway.
The Smithsonian article also offers this view of the increased powers of intellectual synthesis that may result from web-surfing:
Books were good at developing a contemplative mind. Screens encourage more utilitarian thinking. A new idea or unfamiliar fact will provoke a reflex to do something: to research the term, to query your screen “friends” for their opinions, to find alternative views, to create a bookmark, to interact with or tweet the thing rather than simply contemplate it. Book reading strengthened our analytical skills, encouraging us to pursue an observation all the way down to the footnote. Screen reading encourages rapid pattern-making, associating this idea with another, equipping us to deal with the thousands of new thoughts expressed every day.
My own experience is that following links sometimes fragments my attention and leads me down rabbit holes, but it also encourages me to connect many ideas I might not otherwise have done. I suppose there's the danger of turning into one of those guys who's always muttering about how "it's all part of the pattern: the Freemasons, Obama's birth certificate, fluoridation."
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