There is no shortage of recent evidence on this process, which is in full development today, also given the colossal financial interests that support and benefit from it and which presents before us a nation of frantic and highly knowledgeable idiots, who know everything but understand nothing. My alarm in this regard dates back to some time ago, from "Mass media and mass society" to "The perfection of nothingness" to "Dialogic identity" and "Creative empathy".
Finally, it was punctually noted that «time, effort, concentration are all things that we too often lack. We are bombarded with information and have become sieves that catch only the smallest particles of what falls on them, while the rest flows away. Every day it seems like there are more blogs to follow, more magazines to read, books to learn about, information that distracts us. As the flow of this information continues to grow, it becomes increasingly difficult to be properly informed."
Joshua Foer deepens his analysis and reaches conclusions that may seem obvious, but which it is good to repeat: «The chronic and widespread inability to remember is a characteristic of our culture, and it is so deeply rooted that we consider it a fact.
But that wasn't always the case. Once, a long time ago, the only thing one could do with thoughts was remember them. There was no alphabet to transcribe them into, no paper to fix them on. Everything we wanted to keep had to be memorized, every story we wanted to tell, every idea we wanted to pass on, information we wanted to transmit, had to be remembered first of all.
Today we have photographs to record images, books to store knowledge, and recently, thanks to the Internet, to access humanity's collective memory we just need to keep in mind the appropriate search terms. We have replaced natural memory with a vast superstructure of technological props that have freed us from the burden of storing information in the brain.
These technologies that externalize memory and gather knowledge outside of us have made the modern world possible, but they have also changed the way we think and use our brains. We have given less importance to our internal memory. Having almost no need to remember anymore, sometimes it seems that we have forgotten how to do it. I would like to dwell for a moment on how this situation came about. How did we come to save our memories but lose our memory?
It is strange that Foer does not see how it is the omission and, indeed, the simple ignorance of the immediate context, not only the historical one, which prevents the critical understanding of the dangerous situation, culturally speaking, in which we find ourselves. His observations are well founded, but insufficient and late.
«Living in the midst of a flood of printed words (just yesterday, for example – January 24, 2012 – almost 3000 new books came out), it is difficult to imagine what reading was before Gutenberg, when a book was a handwritten object, rare and expensive, requiring months of work for an amanuensis. Today we write so as not to have to remember, but in the late Middle Ages books were not only considered substitutes but also memory aids. As late as the fifteenth century there might have been only a few dozen copies of any given text, and most likely they were chained to a desk or lectern in some library, which if it held a hundred other books would be considered very well stocked. Scholars knew that after reading a book they were very likely never to see it again, so they had a strong incentive to remember what they read with great effort. We ruminated on the texts, chewing them, regurgitating them and re-chewing them, and thus we came to know them intimately and make them our own.»
In several places, but especially in "Books, readers, society" I have cited at length the case of the young Nietzsche, who, having stumbled upon Arthur Schopenhauer's book, "The world as will and as representation", is no longer able to detach himself from it, he lives and sleeps with it for days and nights, and swears to himself that, by that author, he would never have stopped reading a single line. It wasn't just bibliomania. It was authentic bibliophagy.
Foer notes with great accuracy that, instead, «today we read books 'extensively', without deep concentration and, with rare exceptions, we read them only once. When reading, we put quantity before quality. We have no choice, if we want to keep up to date. Even in the most specialized fields, it is a Sisyphean effort to try to dominate the mountain of words that pours into the world every day. And that means it's practically impossible to make a serious effort to memorize what we read."
It could be argued that we are entering a new era in which having a profound culture - having a well-cultivated and culturally equipped mind - is no longer as important as it once was. A study published in early 2012 in the journal "Science" has given great satisfaction to the exponents of that intelligentsia who, on the other side of the Atlantic, regularly denounce the negative effects that the Internet has on our way of thinking.
A series of experiments conducted by researchers at Columbia University has shown that when we learn concepts that we know are also stored in a computer's memory, our relationship with them changes. When we know someone remembers for us, we invest less in the act of memorizing.
For anyone who spends their time surfing the web, jumping from one topic to another, pausing to check email and sports scores, this has become the primary way of acquiring information. We read, browse web pages, look here and there distractedly, without much effort. And we forget. And arriving, the anthropoid, preceded by the homo sentiens and the Internet aficionado.
For Hegel, reading the newspapers was the morning prayer of modern man. For contemporaries, opening the computer is the first operation in the morning. The machine thinks for the man who made it. It is the new master-slave dialectic. Technique celebrates its triumph of aimless perfection in a forgetful world that has forgotten the purpose of the journey along the way by transforming instrumental values into final values.
