Our culture’s recipe would not be so much for forgetting, but for never remembering the same way in the first place: first because we are splitting our attention too much for our working memory to function optimally; and second, because we assume that in a digital world, we do not need to remember in the ways we remembered in the past. The current variation of Socrates’ worry is that our increased reliance on external forms of memory, combined with the attention-dividing bombardment by multiple sources of information, is cumulatively altering the quality and capacities of our working memory
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