We're all cyborgs now.

Alfred North Whitehead once said "Society advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them." This is the promise of our digital age, but not its guarantee.

Digital technology has simplified our lives in areas like paying bills, coordinating with friends, and getting around in new cities, but the wealth of information available to us can also overwhelm our puny carbon-based brains. The human memory is fragile, error-prone, slow to store and retrieve information, and limited in short-term storage (five to nine "chunks" of information). The first priority is to cope with this influx of information; the second is to bend it to your will.

You can meet the first priority by tuning out a lot of distractions¹, but to thrive in the modern world, you must realize the meaning of this phrase: We're all cyborgs now. There's nothing special about our carbon brains that allows us to process this new influx of information; we have simply learned to make better use of the silicon extensions of those brains.

In much the same way that physical tools like levers, wedges, inclined planes, and pulleys allow people who understand them to apply their limited physical strength more effectively, logical tools allow people who understand them to apply their limited psychic strength² more effectively.

Just like basic physical tools are combined into machines which are better- and worse-suited to the human body (axes, dollies, bicycles, airplanes, dental drills), iteration, symbolic manipulation, and conditional execution are combined into machines which are better- and worse-suited to the human mind (digital calendars and address books, search engines, note-taking software, spreadsheets, safe e-commerce, awful programmable VCRs from the 90s). Devices which remember for us, research for us, repeat for us, compute decisions based on our criteria, and communicate amongst themselves are now ubiquitous.

Just like a basic understanding of physics and physiology can make us much safer and effective when applying our physical strength, an understanding of the basic elements of computing and cognitive psychology make us clearer and more effective when applying our psychic strength. This argues for the importance of widespread education in computing, and even basic programming (very different from the traditional "computer courses" where elementary students learn to use Microsoft Word to print out essays) and raising the bar in terms of what we expect from ourselves when interacting with our technology.

What's the best way for a civilian aspiring-cyborg to learn these computing basics--the analog to basic physics in the mechanical world? I might not be the best person to ask about this, given that software is my bread-and-butter. My instinct is to point you at learning the basics of a programming language, probably JavaScript. It looks like this fellow might be in a familiar situation to yours, you non-programmers out there. His recommendation of the online version of Eloquent JavaScript, in particular, seem to be a perfect fit.

END COMMUNICATION

¹Here are the worst offenders of information overload in our age, and what to do about them: Email, Facebook, Cell phones, and news sites/blogs (this one included).

• Email: If you use Outlook for email at work, disable the desktop notifications. Companies that use Outlook tend to use Communicator as well. Don't turn email into a hacky instant messaging client. 
• Facebook: Learn about Operant Conditioning, particularly the insidious nature of Intermittent Reward. Then walk away. 
• Cell phones: If someone said, "I'll sell you a brick that buzzes and beeps every 53 minutes to distract you from what you're doing," you wouldn't be interested. That's not why we buy cell phones, so we shouldn't let them turn into productivity randomization bricks by accident. At home, keep it plugged in away from you. At work, keep it silenced, face-down and out of sight. This will also spare you the embarrassing experience of your phone turning into a meeting-interrupting brick.
• Blogs: You're never going to read the entire internet. Use your social network as a sort of reverse-pyramid scheme to filter out the real gems, but even then know what you want to accomplish before you sit down to consume hypermedia.

²I don't believe in psychics, but I think that "psychic strength" is a cool phrase for describing brain power.