When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on how technology, such as GPS and the internet, has changed our relationship with memory and knowledge.
Joshua Foer's quote highlights the impact of technology on human memory and cognition. It suggests that modern tools like GPS devices and online resources have supplanted traditional memory functions, enabling us to access information and directions effortlessly, but possibly at the cost of our own ability to remember and retain knowledge. This commentary raises questions about the implications of relying heavily on external devices for what were once fundamental human capabilities.
In practice
In a presentation about the effects of technology on learning.
We're all just a bundle of habits shaped by our memories. And to the extent that we control our lives, we do so by gradually altering those habits, which is to say the networks of our memory. No lasting joke, or invention, or insight, or work of art was ever produced by an external memory. Not yet, at least.
Sequencing - the careful striptease by which you reveal information to the reader - matters in an article, but it is absolutely essential to a book.
Monotony collapses time; novelty unfolds it. You can exercise daily and eat healthily and live a long life, while experiencing a short one. If you spend your life sitting in a cubicle and passing papers, one day is bound to blend unmemorably into the next - and disappear.
I met with amnesiacs and savants, educators and scientists, to try to understand what memory is, why it works, why it sometimes doesn't, and what its potential might be.
If you were a medieval scholar reading a book, you knew that there was a reasonable likelihood you'd never see that particular text again, and so a high premium was placed on remembering what you read. You couldn't just pull a book off the shelf to consult it for a quote or an idea.
There are two possibilities: Either the kiss is a human universal, one of the constellation of innate traits, including language and laughter, that unites us as a species, or it is an invention, like fire or wearing clothes, an idea so good that it was bound to metastasize across the globe.
The Internet's abundance - of information, goods, tastes and sources of authority - creates unparalleled opportunities for individuals to get exactly what they want. But this plenitude threatens political and cultural authorities who believe in telling individuals what they can have rather than letting them choose for themselves.
We have reason not to be afraid of the machine, for there is always constructive change, the enemy of machines, making them change to fit new conditions.
I mean, you can't have advertising be the only official business of the information economy if the information economy is going to take over.
If you look at iPod, iPod wasn't viewed as a success, but today it's viewed as an overnight success. The iPhone was the same way. People were writing about there's no physical keyboard. Obviously nobody would want it.
In technology, we spend so much time experimenting, fine-tuning, getting the absolute cheapest way to do something - so why aren't we doing that with social policy?
Proprietary software is an injustice.
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