The Missing Chords of Memory

Can't find your car keys? Perhaps you are not having a senior moment but rather experiencing the greatest threat mankind has yet faced: the shortened attention span wrought by internet overuse. As more sophisticated hand-held toys (Two-Way Wrist Radios, Eye Phones, etc.) present their slavish owners with the illusion of universal knowledge, we see people slowly losing the ability to think, and more importantly, to remember. As the most simple tasks are turned over to machines, memorization powers are being reduced to knowing which button to push to answer questions as basic as "Where am I?" to the more complex "What am I?" Don't take our word for it. Once again Nicholas Carr at the Atlantic magazine sounds the alarm for anyone who has taken their ear buds out to hear it. You can only wake up and smell the coffee if you actually know how to make a cup (or drive through Starbucks while checking your email).

But the Information Scientists are not content with your addiction to picture wrist watches. They want to wipe out all alternatives. Just look at your local library and the shelves that seem to grow ever more empty even while unprecedented numbers of citizens are donating their codex collections to the same institutions. American libraries are becoming little more than free DVD rental stations who periodically recycle the printed heritage of a given community through monthly book sales. And this is also part of the great forgetting that Mr. Carr talks about, because people will eventually forget the purpose of a library, if they have not already. It won't be long until the books vanish entirely; those who have personal libraries will hoard them and seem like bizarre cat ladies to their neighbors, and on their passing those who clean up the place will simply roll up the dumpster rather than call the Public Information Center (yeah, we used to call it a library.) The time has come for frank talk about the codex and its future. That future is in the archives.