Smarter Than You Think by Clive Thompson
Thompson's book, "Smarter Than You Think," strikes me as interesting for a variety of reasons. The chapter I reflected on the most heavily was Chapter two though, which concentrates on memory and Thompson's concept of "digital memory." He writes, "The way machines will become integrated into our remembering is likely to be in smaller, less intrusive bursts. In fact, when it comes to finding meaning in our digital memories, less may be more” (37). Now I'd like to unpack this quotation from the book beginning with the idea of machines becoming "integrated" into our remembering. What kind of extensions can we make and infer from this idea? For me it brings-to-mind the idea that human memory has evolved to keep up with the developments and creations of mankind, that is, memory served as an extremely important tool of rhetoric in the time of Aristotle's rhetorical canon, but now most of the information that people would be required to remember can be Googled in an instant, and therefore, memory is much less useful with the world's greatest search engine at your finger tips. Observing this phenomena as adaptation might be too optimistic, which I am tempted to protest. The truth, relatively speaking, is that human memory has had to work much less hard as the times have changed. I would even suggest that memory has weakened significantly since the development of the Internet, and arguably even before that, with the development of books, where information people couldn't remember, because it was so plentiful, had to be recorded. I suspect this was why Socrates and Plato protested writing their teachings down.
Now what does Thompson mean by "...finding meaning in our digital memories..."? That's a somewhat more difficult idea to wrestle with, but I think that compromising the memory, by not employing it for anything, is dangerous for mankind. Thompson explores "lifeloggers," who, in the simplest terms, log every part of their banal, day-to-day lives on the web, or through some technological means. This allows them to, in many ways, forget what they "had" to remember. This seems to be quite a serious problem to me because people are given the opportunity to be lazy, and simply forget whatever they likely should remember. The old saying goes... "You don't use it, you lose it," and this applies to all functions of the mind, from memory to motor-function. The less people use their memory, the less active it'll be, but there's another issue with memory I haven't gotten to.
Limitations of memory. Think about it. Why would people want to "lifelog" anyway? What do they have to gain? I, perhaps rudely, assumed that these individuals were too "lazy" to remember things, so they just logged them, however, this may be a counteraction to the faultiness of the human memory, and all it's complicated misgivings, misunderstandings, and general haze. Perhaps these individuals are simply attending to the limitation of memory by logging their lives. But this limitation isn't detrimental as far as I'm concerned. Having a "human" memory doesn't entail perfection. That's something the memory doesn't promise, and this is okay, even though it's bloody inconvenient at times, sure. In all honesty, I'm just tempted to ask if people even find being people acceptable. I hope this makes sense for readers, but to rephrase, why do people have such an issue with their limitations? Why is a faulty memory, after hundreds, thousands of years, do we just now want to push back against our imperfect memories? Is it because we now have the technology to give us a piggy-pack ride while we try to remember? Technology and machines certainly make this process much less difficult for us, but in no way will it ever be authentic. Maybe I'm moving in circles here, since I'm also a firm believer in journaling, which is, ironically, a technology man uses to remember, or reflect, but the main problem I see here is that, whether it's through technology, logging, typing, etc., or down on paper, there's still the limitation of what our mind has retained and can spout off while "recording" the memories from our minds. No doubt something is lost every time. That can't be helped, but now I'm thinking of images and other forms of media, which capture image-by-image, the memory. How do we even think about memory? How do we define it? Here we go...
So memory is essentially "storing and remembering information." Does thinking about it this way help unpack Thompson's meaning in "digital memory"?
It seems that Thompson is essentially creating an argument in his book that man and machine can work together for mutual benefit. He begins this idea talking about man versus machine online chess games, and then continues through the next five chapters exploring, in a somewhat optimistic way, the workings of human tools and their connection to the human mind, how machine and man aren't all that different in terms of how they move through time and utilize one another, if that makes an ounce of sense.
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