The Brain Butler

I really enjoy wine, partially thanks to a man I dated a few years back. He was quite passionate about the topic, avidly reading Wine Spectator, and he could spend 45 minutes picking out a wine for dinner that night. Other than the painfully long waits in the wine store, this was perfect for me. I benefited from his superior taste and knowledge without having to spend a second learning anything.

But riding his intellectual coattails didn't work over the long term. We broke up and I was left with, well, a bratty tongue that wanted all the best wines still and a dull brain that hadn't manage to learn much more than which names meant red and which white.

I don't think my plight is rare either. I once read an article proposing that couples often store information in each other's heads. One person is good at finances. The other makes exceptional pasta primavera. Voila! A symbiotic partnership is born.

But I've started to notice that this is seeping beyond the confines of a serious relationship. It's showing up among friends and, more surprising, co-workers with similar jobs. At my workplace, a design agency, people within one capability are micro-specializing. We each have reputations for being interested in different aspects of our job. This means each of us are keepers of different bundles of knowledge.

I, for instance, enjoy being a first adopter of newer technologies that are in the early stages of user-friendliness (i.e. I don't have to do any of my own coding or head to Radio Shack for a new cord, but few other people have heard of the software/site/product yet). So co-workers send me links to things they don't have time to explore but think I might like. When I have time, I wander to the sites and try something new.

Whether this trend is new or not, I couldn't pretend to say. But I would propose that based on how much information there is in the world, it's bound to increase. As information overwhelms, we start piecing together support systems to comb through it. Those support systems include bloggers whom we've come to trust the taste of despite having never met, ex-boyfriends who hold all the knowledge we need about wine, and co-workers who research things and then report back any exciting new technologies / trends / content.

My favorite word for this is bit literacy, coined, I believe, by Mark Hurst, who is particularly concerned that we all have ever-improving experiences with technology despite the potential to be overwhelmed by its content.

Perhaps we can consciously acknowledge the need to rely on others for those bits. Call them brain butlers — friends, co-workers or bloggers who are willing to research topics we have no time for and parse it down to the information we need to know. Kinda makes you want to choose your friends (and your place of employment) a little more wisely.