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The Web is a technology of forgetfulness.
the content and character of that person’s memory. People born into societies that celebrate individual achievement, like the United States, tend, for example, to be able to remember events from earlier in their lives than do people raised in societies that stress communal achievement, such as Korea.40
carries and projects the history of the future. Culture is sustained in our synapses.
Culture is more than the aggregate of what Google describes as “the world’s information.” It’s more than what can be reduced to binary code and uploaded onto the Net. To remain vital, culture must be renewed in the minds of the members of every generation. Outsource memory, and culture withers.
How is the way we read changing? How is the way we write changing? How is the way we think changing? Those are the questions we should be asking, both of ourselves and of our children.
I’m not sure I could live without it.
following simple and rather obvious instructions. The Turing test, it turned out, was as much a test of the way human beings think as of the way machines think.
In simulating a human being, however clumsily, ELIZA encouraged human beings to think of themselves as simulations of computers.
apostate’s
The typewriter makes for lucidity, but I am not sure that it encourages subtlety.”17
“We shape our tools,” observed the Jesuit priest and media scholar John Culkin in 1967, “and thereafter they shape us.”19
building on Mumford’s point,
sensitivity to what’s lost as well as what’s gained. We shouldn’t allow the glories of technology to blind our inner watchdog to
why we hear a human voice when ELIZA speaks.
When a ditchdigger trades his shovel for a backhoe, his arm muscles weaken even as his efficiency increases. A similar trade-off may well take place as we automate the work of the mind.
efficient, its output more predictable. Industry prospered. What was lost along with the messiness was personal initiative, creativity, and whim. Conscious craft turned into unconscious routine.
How, I wondered, would the Edexcel software discern those rare students who break from the conventions of writing not because they’re incompetent but because they have a special spark of brilliance? I
In place of subjectivity, they give us formula.
How sad it would be, particularly when it comes to the nurturing of our children’s minds, if we were to accept without question the idea that “human elements” are outmoded and dispensable.
