An interesting piece in the NYTimes today that overlaps and furthers some of my vague thinking about the blog as virtual memory bank. Johnson claims that our ability to instantaneously sort through our accumulated data via software, Google's new desktop search function for instance, will change the way we write:
"When you're freewheeling through ideas that you yourself have collated -- particularly when you'd long ago forgotten about them -- there's something about the experience that seems uncannily like freewheeling through the corridors of your own memory. It feels like thinking."
I wonder if it does not further the erosion of our capacity for memory? OR perhaps these new tools are repairing some of the damage done to memories and attention spans by modern media developments? Artificial mental limbs? Seems to me I've read something about how memory, culturally speaking, ain't what it used to be. But I can't remember.
