[...] Would Lincoln Have Become President If He Had E-mail? [...]

I think we are a generation where big, revolutionary ideas do not come from individuals, but where the crowd, through web-enabled communication, is able to embrace and sculpt ideas in a concurrent way.

That’s an interesting angle on the issue. Here’s a follow-up question, are these new, crowdsourced ideas the same type as those that come from deep, long thinking? If not what are we missing and what are we gaining?

are we doomed to be a generation bereft of big ideas?

I think we are a generation where big, revolutionary ideas do not come from individuals, but where the crowd, through web-enabled communication, is able to embrace and sculpt ideas in a concurrent way.

[...] of all, ambiguous requests that eat up so much of our day. Perhaps even more profound, imagine the focus you could achieve if there was no inbox to check. Instead, you just worked until you finished what you needed to, then shut down the computer, and [...]

I’m not entirely sure I get your meaning. I think it may be a personality thing more than anything else; I still mull over problems, even those that I do discuss with my friends. I think one of my biggest luxuries right now (though I hadn’t thought about it that way until now) is the time that I “waste” standing and waiting for things to start or just riding the bus. Today, I thought through an algebraic problem for my geology class; and had an epiphany on it as well. I wonder how many other people take the time to really consider things and how they connect and work, rather than just finding the quickest, easiest, most correct answer.

I agree as well, I can do better studies and all when my laptop is off or just not beside me. For some reason I tend to be lazier to turn it on when it is already off.

Interesting…

Let me play for a moment with your thoughts on big ideas in science. True, stuff that was hard a long time ago can be done quickly today. But the measure of “big” is probably more dependent on the impact on the scientific community’s understanding of the world. On that metric, the question remains, do we have less big ideas? Of course, there is the related question of the rise of big science, and how it’s changed the research process (no more Watson and Crick playing with models in the age $50 million dollar labs.) One might also argue that science, due to its explicit reward system, is the one place that will retain focus even as the rest of society collectively loses its concentration.

All very interesting…

In stead these people would rather go and do what they think is more productive work, and just hammer away in memorizing what other people have said.

This is obviously causing the amount of grand idea thinkers to decrease, and with time they might even vanish.