Cognitive experiences mediated by technology - Three examples

It's really difficult to come up with only three cognitive experiences mediated by technology. If you were born in the 90s, you probably know no other type. I was born in the late 70s but still, raised by a geek father and a very open-minded mother, I was exposed to technology in a way that most children raised in the 80s weren't, at least not in Brazil: I had an Atari, dad brought a computer home and started learning to code COBOL, I got to play tons of computer games and started coding myself at a very early age.

All that is to say that most of my cognitive experiences are mediated by technology in the electronic sense (the sense most people think of when saying technology). To filter out the crud, I'll focus on experiences that used to be analog to me until a few years ago:

Navigating is one of my passions. I love paper maps and moving around, and also love urban life and exploring the nooks and crannies of different cities. Until a few years ago, navigating using digital devices was cumbersome (it was only 2006 when I was still printing maps from Google Maps, itself an evolution of going to an airport bookstore and buying a city map). Back then, I'd plan a trip and prepare maps so I could locate myself within the city, waypoints in marker pen and annotations galore, like where to take the correct buses etc. Nowadays I use my smartphone for most navigation, from Google Maps for general mapping to Foursquare to find nice places to eat and drink and Waze to drive around with spoken instructions in Portuguese (it saves some cognitive overhead of listening to spoken English). Nowadays I'm infatuated with an app called Trafi Eesti (iOS and Android) which gives me public transit routes in a way that kicks Google Maps' ass! It can route in different public transit solutions and can also remember your favorite routes and stops so you know exactly when trolley 3 will pass Kaubamaja or the 11 will leave Kunstiakadeemia. Lots of love there!

Speaking of love (and since we'll be talking of long-distance relationships), my relationship with Cau began online and we had never seen each other's face for a long time before I finally decided to travel 500km to see her. We remained living apart for many months after that, communicating via social networking and smartphone apps. This has shaped the way we communicate even now: we love sharing links with each other so even if we're in the same room, we may send a Facebook message every now and then. We are constantly in touch via WhatsApp and, since I'm notified of her messages on my Pebble, I don't even need to be actively looking at my phone to know her whereabouts online and offline: if she posts something to my Facebook timeline, my wrist vibrates, ditto if I'm at work and she checks-in on Foursquare. It even sounds creepy told this way, but this is public information we choose to share (a whole tangle of complications itself, since most people's sense of privacy is completely distorted nowadays, but I'll leave that for another discussion). In a sense, our intimate space is the size of the distance between us, because we're never really apart thanks to technology.

We love watching TV shows together, but decided that, even though cable is very cheap in Tallinn, we'd become cord-cutters: most of the TV shows we like are easier to watch over Netflix, which is actually even cheaper than cable. So we instead subscribe just to fast internet and built a home-theater PC. It replaced the cable box, radio and my XBox 360. I now buy games online via Steam and a single box deals with everything entertainment-connected in the house: no extra remote controllers, no tangle of cables. It actually reduced piracy, as weird as it might sound: we never get frustrated that there's noting to watch on TV or no new games to play, so the urge to download movies via Torrents has decreased, instead of increasing a lot like I predicted it would when we decided to abandon cable and a game-dedicated box. Really unexpected.

There are many experiences more that were re-shaped by digital technology, but these are very poignant examples and I believe they illustrate the concept well.