What price cheap storage and easy access to info? Could it be, as Kottke suggests … a bad memory?
I’ve been increasingly aware of this phenomenon with my own memory. Emails are forgotten seconds after they’re read; Mail.app will keep track of those. If I’m having lunch with a friend and they bring up something I’ve posted to kottke.org recently, it often takes me several seconds to remember posting it…my weblog (my outboard brain) is where I put things that I want to “remember”. I’ve never been able to remember people’s names worth a damn, but until recently, I knew hundreds of URLs. Now my newsreader keeps track of those for me. I know 3 phone numbers by heart: mine, Meg’s, and that of my childhood home (where my dad still resides); the rest are in my cell phone. Birthdays and special occasions are in iCal…I know a few friends’ birthdays and when the 4th of July is, but that’s about it. And Google remembers everything else.
To some degree, I agree. I joke, too, about my blog being my extended memory, and use it a such. My Palm reminds me of timed events I no longer recall, gives me a place to scrawl notes and then forget about them, records folks addresses and phone numbers that I would never possibily remember, etc. And who needs to become a master of Star Trek trivia when it’s just a click or two away on the Net?
On the other hand, is that all necessarily a bad thing? I seem to recall (heh) reading that when human societies started to go from bards and balladeers memorizing long tales to having them actually (gasp) written down, there were plenty of folks who decried the innovation — that this would lead to an inability to, well, memorize a whole bunch of stuff. And, yet, have we really gotten stupider? Or have we simply applied that brainpower (and the innovation of fixed storage) in new and better ways?
Just something to think about.
Well, Socrates argued against writing anything down, in part because it weakens the mind but also because anything you write down can be taken out of context, twisted, and made to serve another’s purpose. He said something about writing your thoughts down being like leaving your children without anyone to defend them from villans. So I think it’s safe to say that people have been concerned about the corrosive effects of technology on the human brain for a quadrillion years. (Not quite sure how long, precisely, I’d have to look it up.)