Nice article about Smartphones, Blackberries & iPhones being "extensions" of cognitive powers of brain comparable to biological body.
Does a good job of making sense of why I get so worked up when these technological extensions don't conform to my needs, why I get so engrossed into finding a solution & why it gets so frustrating when the means aren't out there.
For instance: the Blackberry Google sync program has done wonders for making life easier & cutting down on effort into communicating with the wife (could wife be considered another bodily extension when conflict doesn't occur?) & keeping schedule straight. I've tried integrating Facebook events into this sync cycle but there's no way that I know of to do it without some manual steps, which I would really like to avoid. By the end of this aggravating process, I improved the manual process steps, but I couldn't find any useful automatic way to sync Facebook events with my running calendars that sync with each other "globally."
Getting the automatic FB event sync going with all my other calendars would be awesome & free up a lot of time & cognitive resources. But no. . .I still have to spend about a half hour or so whenever I want to sync up my FB events with my main "global" calendar. So yeah, I can totally agree with the argument that PDA & the cloud can totally act as an extension of the brain's executive function, at least to take away some cognitive load from it.
Part of me wishes PCs were more app-oriented like mobile phones, as an end user. At same time I do like the ability of customization & some of the power I have through a more direct file-based system or however a PC is setup in Windows/Mac. Linux and Unix go too far in that direction of developer, admin, etc. for me.
I'm kinda surprised FB events are such a big deal in your life! For me they're just the occasional novelty pretty easily handled in a manual fashion...
A lot of people use it in lieu of Evite these days. Lots of Chicago friends use it to invite people to stuff.
Personally, I would rather people used the Gmail calendar, but people around here use FB to plan events & invite people. After all, everyone's on FB these days.
Also, whenever we go to Boston, FB events is what's used for the big event where we get to see everyone.
I don't know how much the FB for event planning is localized to Chicago or the people I socialize with, or if it's a general phenomena since most everyone on the Internet uses FB these days.
OK, the annoying part about the FB event to Google Calendar syncing: private events show up as "private" and can't be easily transferred to personal Google Calendar. Instead of doing an easy open even in Google then copy to your own personal calendar, you have to sign into FB then e-mail yourself a Google invite then sign into Google to accept it. If I could accept that type of invite from FB on my BB or through regular e-mail, it would be less annoying. . .but FB just seems to try to make as many steps as possible to add private invites to your own private calendar. . ..