An old school-chum and I were having coffee the other day, and as we were vaguely remembering some things and almost not remembering some others, my friend made an interesting observation about the effect of digital media on our individual memory. Since we are now able to retrieve any information at any time at the click of a search button online or on our desktop, our need for memory has diminished, and with this diminishing need so too, perhaps, our facility to remember. This observation may or may not be valid, and maybe there will one day be academic studies to demonstrate both its absolute veracity and its complete falsehood, but the notion does warrant reflection.
As we sat there in the Silver Spurs diner on Broadway and 9th, well rested, bright and early on a sunny morning, our coffee mugs refilled most promptly, but without a good Internet connection into our PDAs, we couldn’t remember if it was Game 6 or Game 7 back in 1994, when John Starks kept missing 3-pointers against Houston. For some of us New Yorkers, that’s a strange thing to forget. There were some other things too, which we would have normally looked up on Google.
Now, granted, the flip-side of the argument is that there is information now at our collective disposal that would not possibly fit in any single human mind, and surely there are studies to show that humans are now more intelligent than ever as a result. (I may have to Google this and pray that I don’t find its exact opposite.) But still, a personal memory is a comforting facility, for the most part. And so we agreed, there and then, although I don’t remember for sure, that we should make an effort to remember better, to exercise our memories as best and often as we can, because there is less and less pressing need to do so. We could, for example, try to remember the lyrics to that old song before instinctively reaching for the keyboard. We could try to recall a class-mate’s home town, before logging into the alumni directory.
Just a couple of instances each day, only a few foregone click-throughs. We can begin like that, and if nothing else the internet will become faster. In an extreme scenario, if we aren’t careful, we may become entirely dependent on web searches, and that will not do at all… what with search engine optimization and pay per click and all sorts of new and improved ways to game the web, there is no telling what we will be prone to remember if we don’t plan ahead.
