The Internet as memory hole.

I am long out of practise with blogging.  If you choose to comment, be aware that this was written in less than ten minutes at one in the morning.

In a discussion with the denizens of the #acetarium IRC channel earlier, an acquaintance brought up that he had learnt of the last execution performed in France being done by guillotine in 1977.  Offhandedly, I said, “Yeah, I knew of that, and I believe it was a North African migrant who was executed.”  Apparently, it was a Tunisian gentleman, though I recalled no other details.

That brought me to thinking about the accessibility of information.

When I was educated (to what degree that is a past tense statement — no one stops learning until they are dead), I had a great deal of work to do in terms of memorising facts and statements and arguments and opinions.  (I was certainly allowed to have my own opinions, but I was taught logical thought from considered models, so I would learn how to structure my own arguments.  It’s not my teachers’ fault that it didn’t take.)

In all of this memorisation and synthesis, I was being educated in the late 1980s and early 1990s in a model that was already considered outdated — education was meant to be more about personal development by that point, rather than on memorising facts.  I’m not going to get into a discussion of that, as I’m not a fool, but it affected how I model myself on information.

I grew up with copious access to the Internet, CompuServe before 1994 and the Internet itself afterward, but Wikipedia didn’t become a project until 2001 and access to information in terms of “Just Google It” (or just AltaVista it, or use Jeeves or Yahoo, back in the day) was not really a thing before the millennium at least.  True, you could search the Internet, but it didn’t mean that there would be any information, not for a very long time, and often not at all.

Our old model of memorising facts seems extremely out of date when one can simply look up a bit of trivia that seems intriguing but isn’t relevant to our work or daily life.  And, indeed, many people now rely on simply Googling what they forgot, and libraries in general and research librarians in particular have been scrambling to re-orient information so it is available to people in these new ways.

It has long been known to anthropologists and neurological researchers that cultures where literacy is relatively rare often have a comprehensive oral tradition, and facts can be passed through oral historians quite accurately for many years.

Cultures where literacy, on the other hand, is indeed widespread often have a comprehensive written tradition, as storing information through writing is both extremely reliable and not as dependent on the narrator’s imperfect memory, and in the unfortunate event of the sudden death of the author, the information will, ideally, still be available.  Oral traditions usually decline in these cultures.

Are we, in the Internet age, we, who do not even need to write things down much of the time, what with modern search algorithms and infinite databases and often, no need to memorise even the contents of a book, as we can simply look up whatever we need, developing the inverse of an oral tradition?  I am not clear on how this would look, nor what to call it, but we are developing a new method of interacting with knowledge, and I think it is likely a revolution … but is it the right revolution?

For the Internet is not permanent.  It is, of course, in many ways, but sites go down, mirrors vanish, archives are blocked by robots.txt and x-no-archive: yes.  Fragments of information remain, but they are as capricious as the results of historians reconstructing lost texts and archaeologists finding clues, but no definite answer.

This is fine for remote history (though it depresses me as a historian), but for information we would have learnt recently?  How are we coping with this?

The mind is immensely adaptable.  Anyone who has even the most superficial knowledge of neurology (and mine is extremely superficial) is aware of the fact that the brain can adapt in astounding ways to injuries and interruptions.

But in shaping the brain initially … are we changing our ability to actually hold on to this information?  Are we developing 1984-style memory holes?  If we lose this fragment of information, is it gone forever?  Is all the information controlled outside of our own brains?  I speak in hyperbole, but we are outsourcing a great deal of knowledge these days.  Fundamentally, many people do not know the content, they simply know where to look and which key words to search.  If that content disappears … did we ever truly know it?