I have been thinking about my memory lately; it doesn't seem up to par. Grasping for simple words has been a common occurrence. As my brain and I grasp for language we can think of a thousand images, contextual moments, ideas, readings, cultural movements that will surround the word that we are seeking: everything but that one thing I need to articulate. It happens to everyone, but I feel like it is some degenerative disease that has entered me.

In ancient times when everyone was going around talking about rhetoric there was a pretty big debate going about this new technology "writing." Plato discussed how speech is a living thing, and an ephemeral thing, that is by its nature malleable. Writing, on the other hand, is a thing removed, a dead thing, something without a home once it leaves the authors hands. Writing was widely accused of ruining the memory as well...what was I... Oh Yeah, because if you write what you want to say down you no longer have to go through an elaborate process to recall it. In Rome lengthy speeches were made walking through memory: writing would put an end to that art (or so people feared).

Writing was a technology that changed the way people were thinking about the world. Walter Ong claimed that cultures who write think in a fundamentally different way than cultures that are strictly oral in nature. He claimed that writing allows for linear thinking because its form is linear. Writing things down requires a whole different effort to create time and space for readers that are "out there." If you are in an oral culture and standing under a tree, and say, "that tree there," we (cause we're there with you) know just what you are talking about. A minimal number of words and we are all on the same-ish page. Now, if you say, "that tree there," on the written page: WTF? We have no idea what is going on. To write it you need to name a lot of different things. To get me to your tree you have to speak many words, and they need to be in an order I can understand them. But your tree is not in my time, or my space: your tree has traveled through time and space! Cool technology.

If writing was able to change the way we think... what’s happening to us now? This is a pretty extensive series of technologies. The funny thing about my gaps in memory of late is that they would be findable if only Google were in my head. All I would have to recall is a tangential moment in order to locate my communication. With a Google brain I would recall pathways to thoughts instead of trying to remember every little word. Besides, we needed all that vocabulary and all those words because we couldn't just say, "that tree there." We needed to say, "that giant oak with the red leaves that has a big scar from that one time we got out the ax for no good reason and then felt guilty." Now I could just send you a phone pic with a text and we would be on the same-ish page...right? The technological interplay between my mind and the tools that are available to express my mind with are interesting. Are we designing technology to work with the mind, or is the technology designing me to work with it?

to work with it?