Google as collective memory
I was the only person under 30 in my meeting today; two others were under 50, but the rest (five of them) were older. A recap of Larry Powell’s message to the Downtown Rotary provided interesting conversation.
Powell (who has delivered an identical message to my Rotary club), describes the current generation as digital natives; our parents are digital immigrants, and their parents are digital dinosaurs. His point (one of them, at least): those responsible for educating the current generation are disconnected from the way they learn.
The conversation later turned to Mark Bauerlein, The Dumbest Generation. I’ve just ordered it, and thus have yet to read it, so I cannot offer a reflection on the book’s content, though I will comment on one of the conclusions drawn in our discussion.
Powell argues that black text on white paper isn’t as conducive to reading for the youngest generation; rather, their eyes are drawn more easily to burnt orange. The broader conclusion from the discussion in my meeting was that this generation simply doesn’t read, which is certainly debatable (we may not read books, for instance).
What’s more, we apparently have no mental archive of historical events. As a member of the "dumbest" generation, my immediate reaction was to question the purpose of such a claim. I’ve loathed any history class I’ve ever taken, skimming the required reading (at most).
Is historical memory necessary when we have Google? That question kept rand in my mind all afternoon.
A co-worker, in his mid-thirties, answered it with a reference to his seemingly infinite familiarity with Isaac Hayes, who recently passed away. Evidently, upon hearing of Hayes’ death, he turned to the world’s collective memory, and read enough from the search results to write a short biography.
I’m not arguing that history is wrong, bad, pointless, or anything other than history. Instead, I’m questioning the assumption that what we’ve learned, and the way we’ve learned it, are as relevant today as they were one or two generations ago (which is in line with what I’ve heard from Powell).
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