Introduction to Version 2.0

Here I go again.

The last time I posted under the blog "Brain of Phil" was March 19, 2007. Two-plus years later, I'm reviving the concept as The Brain of Phil 2.0. This blog will largely follow the model of the original, but it represents my worldly thoughts after a two-year hiatus to pursue other creative interests.

As I wait for my B.Ed. program at the University of Toronto to begin this coming September, I am once again writing about connections I see between various stories (news events, books, etc.). In the globalized, inter-connected world of the 21st century, people have the opportunity to contribute to the pool of human knowledge. We can look at multiple stories and/or events, ponder their relationships, produce new insight based on our analysis, and then make our ideas available to the public.

Since I last posted to the original Brain of Phil, new technological advances have developed that allow even greater distribution of our insights. There is the social networking phenomenon Facebook. I first got onto Facebook in May 2007, just after moving back to Canada, and now I get the daily "news" of my friends' lives. It's addictive and quite fun, but it also raises many issues of privacy, especially since so many users are young people who don't think about the consequences of laying their personal lives out in the open. (For an example, read about the Vancouver teen who was expelled from school for using Facebook in a less-than-intelligent way.)

Another development was the release of the iPhone, which brought together the capability of accessing all kinds of media along with the ability to communicate by voice or data in a popular, user-friendly device. Yes, I know that such capability technically existed before the iPhone. But just as podcasting existed but never really took off prior to iTunes adding podcasts to their store, it is the development of the iPhone by the folks at Apple (re: Steve Jobs) that began to show the potential of anytime, anywhere connectivity. At least, that's what I think.

Well, I could go on, but a lot of what I feel like saying is pretty self-evident to anyone who pays even the remotest amount of attention to what is going on. I will just say that The Brain of Phil 2.0 is my mental playpen. It is my attempt to make sense of the complex, yet fascinating world in which I live. It will not always look scholarly -- after all, it is a blog. But I hope it makes some kind of impact on the world.