What Do You Choose To Forget?

After listening to Lisa Jardine's podcast "Information Overload" I still agree with my first stance about the article "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" The internet has done a lot for our generation over the years, and I believe that because this information is available to us more easily, it makes us more lazy. (Myself included.) Jardine starts off her podcast by talking about Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone (Or Sorcer's Stone). More specifically when Harry was wearing the invisibility cloak to have access to the restricted section of the library. And how a year later, the founders of Google launched their search engine site. I am guessing this was a coincidence, but it's crazy how fast we are able to access websites on anything. There is this comic I found on StumpleUpon talking about life before Google. I am sure you all know what StumpleUpon is, but if you don't I would recommend that you don't go on it because it can take up a lot of your time, without you realizing it. Here it is:

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It seemed that the faster technology was advancing from handwriting, to book making, to the internet, the more people tried to control it (according to the podcast). And if they couldn't control it, they destroyed it. Having access to so much knowledge at such a rapid pace made them fear what would happen if they lost any of this knowledge. One quote I liked from the podcast was "information might run through their fingers like sand, and be lost forever". It seems we had so much respect and value for this knowledge that we was becoming available to us, that we lost focus on everything else. Reading books because a hassle, "too many books, too little time" was another quote. Who had any time to read through a book? Think back to class last week, when we were asked the question do we still read books? For me I always say every summer that I cannot wait to read a book, because I do read a lot at school, but it is never something that I get to pick and enjoy without having to do an assignment with it. I still like to read books, but I am sure many people would rather go on sparknotes (or other summary websites) and just read the synopsis there. This I constitute as lazy, sure it may be easier, but why not take the time to read a book. And then that brings us to another part about reading. Many of the motion pictures we see are based off of books. Whenever I see a movie preview the said based on 'Such and such's novel" the first question someone will ask is, have you read the book? Most of the time people haven't and instead go see the movie. If people want to see the movie fine, but they shouldn't judge the critique the movie too much if they don't read the book as well (but that is just my opinion).

Having all this information makes us more curious as well, but do we feel like people did in years past when technology was first coming out? How many of us fear that we will lose information? I feel that how we feel about technology has definitely changed, and I think that it always will. My favorite quote from this podcast was the last sentence. "We need to learn how to prune the evidence and ultimately what to forget". When we are searching for things online, we might disregard ads, or certain comments in articles or on movies. We are ultimately the ones who choose what we want to remember, and I think that is a huge thing to think about, especially now with the rapidness of our technology advances.

* Pietschmann, Patti. How Did We Survive Before Google (Cartoon). StumpleUpon.
http://www.stumbleupon.com/su/2ShRYn/www.examiner.com/travel-diva-in-los-angeles/how-did-we-survive-before-google-cartoon-photo/