h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

'If I make the hot chocolate, will you love me forever?' said Mrs Zen about five minutes ago, with more than a touch of sarcasm.

'What song is that from?' I asked, and when we couldn't remember I looked it up on Google.

(Meat loaf's Paradise by the Dashboard Light, since you ask http://www.qgm.com/meatloaf/lyrics/paradise.html)..

We live surrounded by information at our finger tips, any thought, any enquiry can give us an answer in minutes. It wasn't always like this, our internal lives used to be populated with half remembered snatches of culture.

For twenty years my father struggled to remember a poem every time we drove to Chester. He remembered it was about a girl who drowned in the sands of Dee, and a fisherman thought her hair belonged to a mermaid. Every time we drove around the river Dee he told us about this poem, and how he couldn't remember who wrote it, or its title, so he would never find it again.

The image of a drowned girl being mistaken for a mermaid haunted him for years, part of his internal landscape. Haunted him enough that he couldn't see the River Dee without thinking of that image.

Years later, when I got a computer, it took me about 10 seconds to find him the poem http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-sands-of-dee/, and it wasn't nearly as good as he remembered it to be.

I don't know how having access to all the information we need affects our inner monologues, our internal words, and cultural landscapes.

Despite all the info available on the t'internet I still often resort to using my well worn Chambers dictionary and Thesaurus for looking up spellings/words etc. I still have and use some 50 odd reference books as well covering a multitude of topics. The various search engines on the net do make it quicker though, so long as the source is trustworthy of course.

Z, one of the troublesome aspects I've noticed as an outfall of having instant access to all manner of info, is that we are no longer expecting ourselves to "remember" things--whether trivial or important. It seems we are depending on our technology to rescue us whenever we 'come up short' for an answer. More and more, I find the sheer volume of information we're responsible for makes it hard to keep track of all we need to know. It's like a self-perpetuating problem. The technology allows us to gather more data; the data exceeds our ability to handle it; we develop more technology to organize it in different ways; which allows us to gather more data...that we can't keep pace with remembering.

Terabyte implants as the next solution?

B4weALLbecometheBorgwearesoafraidof

*ahem* I knew exactly what song it was, what I couldn't remember was how the life / wife rhyme worked.

Will you love me forever
Do you need me
Wil you never leave me
Will you make me so happy for the rest of my life
Will you take me away and will you make me your wife

Just saying.

I think it changes how we read; or how attentive we are.

Years ago I read an interview with Mike Mansfield, and one of the points he made was that as a result of his job, he didn't read to remember any more - he read to make an "index" in his head and know where to find the information if he needed to look it up later.

I can see what he meant. I do it a lot myself.

An "index"? A frakking "index"?
Okay, well, I do this, too, but it's scary to think we're handling ourselves this way as a society, as a culture, as a race (Mankind).

We do this where I work, to some degree. No ~one~ person is going to remember every detail of how this nuclear power plant functions. Thus, we depend heavily upon our procedures to carry us through the processes required to start up, run/operate, and safely shut down the plant. It has taken quite a few years to hone those procedures into being 'sensible' documents that you can follow in an orderly fashion to accomplish certain tasks. Despite such proceduralization, there are still circumstances that require operators to respond quickly, using the knowledge they've been trained to retain, for just such emergencies. I have to believe this thing of remembering critically important information will never become "a lost art."

B4istartmemorizingeverybitofinfoinmylife

Then again, not *all the knowledge in the world can be googled. I've been trying to find information about a specific Swedish author, but there is none to be found. I guess he wasn't well known enough, nor popular enough, and when I read his books as a kid, he was already in his 50ies. I should probably consult a librarian because, whatever info there is, is probably only available in printed form.

It's kinda funny how older people become "time machines" when they can recall information about something long ago.

B4iscootbackalongthetimeline2the1sttimeiheardthissong

I agree whole-heartedly with all the points made her, especially (for example) the fact that you can now find information about all the children's TV programmes you have such fond memories of - and much of the information shows how warped and romanticised your memories have become.

As for the checklist, OK it is obviously absolutely vital in this case, but I get so cross when people re-invent the wheel (invariably forgetting important parts of the procedure) every time a new product is introduced or discontinued at the place where I work. And because there is no system of paper filing, no one seems to remember events of a couple of years ago on the same topic.

And no one reads more than the first 3 lines of an e-mail. (I've even caught myself out on this one)