All Those Pictures (what do we do with them?)
I read an article (Chicago
Tribune) on the Internet last week:
We’ll never have to remember another phone number ever.
Most of the really important stuff will be up in the Cloud, and all we’ll have to do is type in a command to retrieve it or pull it down. I already google “that thing that somebody said” and other obscure phrases just to see what will prick my memory. Sometimes I have absolutely no idea at all of what it was I was trying to remember, but after googling and refining my search I can usually find what I was looking for. Now if I could just find what’s in my purse—but that’s another matter.
The article talked about “digital amnesia.” In a survey (on-line??) 90 percent said that “they use the Internet as an online extension of their brain.”
The point is: we don’t need
to remember. Because if we do need to access a fact or image all we have to do
is google it and it comes back to us in a second. How many times were you in
the middle of a conversation and lost your train of thought or the name or face
was there at the tip of your tongue and brain—and you paused a minute to check
it on Facebook or using your device to confirm what it was you were talking
about. Like all the time, right?
This is a good thing because we don’t have to waste our
brain cells remembering stuff and it’s a bad thing because—what the heck are we
remembering?
In effect, we are already becoming one with the machine: “We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found,” according to the Science article.
That one thing, you know, uhh . . .is only a click away.
Now—what about all those endless food pictures and selfies
we take? And never get around to looking at. Are we taking pictures so that we
never have to rely on memory, actually remember a special evening out and that
the oysters were to die for . . .
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