Google: The end of memory?

Guest Editorial, Morung Express

There was a time when people would remember each other’s phone numbers and birthdays. Before that, there was a time when people would remember the date and all the tiny details of events. The Japanese invasion, British expedition, the Indian army operations, and all the important date in the Naga national movement are still fresh in the minds of old folks that leave the Google generation dumbfounded. Whole stories are in memory so that good old story tellers can narrate them like reading out a novel. But we have facebook to remind us of friends’ birthdays and we sometimes forget our own phone number. We look up to Google for any information under the sun. But nothing comes out from memory when the occasion demands. So, we keep our phones/laptops like they are an extension of our brains.

Ours is a generation which lives on sound bites. Twitter people cannot bear to sit through a long sermon. We hate narratives. We want our stories in bullet points. We live on news headlines and leave out the details. Perhaps many of the newspaper readers never read the editorials. It is getting worse. It seems like we cannot sit still to read anything in plain text form. If people were moving from reading narratives to bullet points in a power point presentation, the trend now is that even wise-quotes or proverbs have to be put on a picture format or photo background. This restlessness and impatience of our time is making our memories short and shallow.

We know a lot more. But when it comes to any specific detail, we have to look it up in Google. No detail is in memory. Because of the ready availability of the internet, there is no push to memorize anything. So, once we have looked up what we are searching for and used it, it is gone again into the cloud. The Bible verses which I memorized and have been using are all from the pre-mobile phone, pre-internet era. It is so hard to memorize new ones. If I want to recollect a Bible verse, I type a familiar phrase in Google and it takes me to the verse, faster than opening a Bible. Next time I need it, I will repeat the procedure. So, there is no incentive to memorize the chapter or verse if I can get what I want from Google at that speed. We then tend to judge a person’s knowledge more by the technical competence (knowing how to use technology) rather than by what one knows in the heart and mind (Someone who is thought to be knowledgeable may be simply spending a lot of time online so that he knows where to get what information).

I mentioned in the beginning about old folks remembering the dates in our national movement. The stories of our past are passed down to us through the power of memory. We have the danger of losing them unless we write them down. But even if we fill up libraries, newspapers, and the internet, who will read and remember them?