“Pancake People”

As playwright Richard Foreman so beautifully describes it, “we’ve been pounded into instantly available pancakes – spread wide and thin as we connect with the vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.” Has technology replaced our highly educated and articulate personality with “a new self that needs to contain less?” It seems that conceptual thinking and the avant-garde ploy of reading books for discussion is dead. The digital age may jeopardize our core ability to think!   We (myself included) use search engines to simply retrieve information, but books engage the intellect and activate the imagination unlike Google or Bing. Great philosophers have debated whether it is intellect or the will to think. Given this simple idea, like Descartes, I think it is clear that the essence of thinking is to think. Google is only computer cliff notes.