Your brain on computers

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/07/technology/07brain.html?src=me&ref=general

"A temporary way to escape this pain is through aesthetic contemplation (a method comparable to Zapffe's "Sublimation"). This is the next best way, short of not willing at all, which is the best way. Total absorption in the world as representation prevents a person from suffering the world as will. Art diverts the spectator's attention from the grave everyday world and lifts them into a world that consists of mere play of images. With music, the auditor becomes engrossed with a playful form of the will, which is normally deadly serious."

"Of course, if you are a libertarian or even a certain kind of liberal, you will object that these practices do not manufacture anything; they simply give individuality its due. The issue here is a central one in modern philosophy: is individual autonomy an irreducible metaphysical given or a social creation? Descartes famously argued that self or subject, the “I think,” was metaphysically basic, while Hegel argued that we only become self-determining agents through being recognized as such by others who we recognize in turn. It is by recognizing one another as autonomous subjects through the institutions of family, civil society and the state that we become such subjects; those practices are how we recognize and so bestow on one another the title and powers of being free individuals.

All the heavy lifting in Hegel’s account turns on revealing how human subjectivity only emerges through intersubjective relations, and hence how practices of independence, of freedom and autonomy, are held in place and made possible by complementary structures of dependence. At one point in his “Philosophy of Right,” Hegel suggests love or friendship as models of freedom through recognition. In love I regard you as of such value and importance that I spontaneously set aside my egoistic desires and interests and align them with yours: your ends are my desires, I desire that you flourish, and when you flourish I do, too. In love, I experience you not as a limit or restriction on my freedom, but as what makes it possible: I can only be truly free and so truly independent in being harmoniously joined with you; we each recognize the other as endowing our life with meaning and value, with living freedom. Hegel’s phrase for this felicitous state is “to be with oneself in the other.”

Hegel’s thesis is that all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing."

"I think Ellen's image is somewhat different Hanna. Ellen's view, if I understood her correctly, is that modern wo/man, or rather a possibility of her/him, instead of bringing the world inside themselves, are shallow and are only pointers to other places. That is, if once they ate steak and can tell you its taste, all they can do now is tell you someone ate a steak and thought it tasted in a certain way. They have no knowledge of their own only links to other people's knowledge. She contrasts it with Montaigne, who constantly quotes, every second, but everything he quotes he made his own, he ate it so to say.

So your view Hanna of how we are collecting knowledge is a different view. Are we collecting knowledge, or are we only collecting links to other people's knowledge, never to possess anything ourselves.
Take for example of the internet. There are less and less places where you go to be at, instead everything sends you elsewhere, constantly trying to catch its your own tail, running after links.

It is an important point also with regards being dedicated. There is to do everything in the sense of doing nothing as nothing is your own. And there is a way of appropriating everything, making everything your own, and in a way it is really one thing you do."