Spoken, Written, Digitized

Information is only a digital click away. Why bother to remember it?

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The differences in reliable remembering between these three modes of telling may be due to the different amount of energy each requires for the remembering. What is said disappears as soon as the speaker stops speaking.

The only way to recall what was said is to memorize. Memorization requires commitment. The memorizer must want to retain what was said. The process of memorization creates multiple connected sites in the brain. These sites function as cross-reference memory and retrieval storage.

Memories stored in the brain are connected in complex communication that is impossible for algorisms to ever achieve.

Digital Keywords are designed for similar cross-reference function, but not for memory and retrieval storage. Keywords can’t reliably connect you to what you’re searching for; context for the word searched varies too much for consistent usefulness. The brain is light-years better than any algorisms at connecting ideas-to-ideas.

Memorized words, re-memorized by succeeding generations, can last for millennia. That longevity happens because words honored by memorization are presumed to be remembered precisely, word-for-word.

There is a popular notion that stories remembered by oral tradition must surely have been altered and elaborated over the centuries. I don’t believe that notion is true.

I once heard a scholar of oral traditions describe his field work in many small villages located from the Middle East to Uzbekistan. He recorded long hours of story-telling by the local storytellers. If any of these storytellers made a mistake, the villagers would stop the storyteller, and correct the mistake.

There is a carry-over of oral tradition’s respect for word-for-word precision in sacred writings. The Dead Sea Scrolls read exactly as the same texts do today. Medieval monks were punished for small errors of transcription. Modern transcription is more open to doubt.

Memorized words will likely stay with you for the rest of your life. Next best for memory retrieval is writing. Words committed to paper or stone will outlast electricity. When your Kindle is reduced to ancient inoperable artifact, the books on your shelf remain ready to be read afresh.

Printed books have charms that digital books do not have. They stay put. In printed books, typeface and image persist in place as originally intended. Every digital platform twists pictures and words differently. Design is done away with, only data is preserved. There is no place in the digital world for the centuries-old art of book design.

Perhaps some future technologist will find a way to recover book design. Partial solution might be found in an apt that would allow PDF’s to be turned like pages in a book. PDF’s can be scrolled. Turning a page works better.

That’s why scrolls were replaced with books.

There are sensory pleasures in reading a material book that can’t be duplicated digitally; the smell of ink and paper, the contour of an emboss, the feel of the binding. There are also historical delights like marginal notes. Notes that may have been written by yourself years before, or by your grandfather even earlier, or by some other reader from even more years ago. Handwritten-words reveal personality as well as meaning. The very act of holding a book makes it more real and memorable than anything casually scanned from the internet.

Old books capture history, they physically connect new readers to readers past. Digital reproduction cannot do that. What is read digitally is rarely remembered. It tends to go in one ear and out the other. The reason for this is that we’re confident that recovering the information is only a digital click away. Why bother to remember it?

Remembering expands your mind by internalizing knowledge. Remembering gives you the information needed to think for yourself. Remembering allows you to sort-out conflicting ideas and evaluate them against everything else you know. Remembering saves you from pathetic reliance on a digital device while your head remains full of nothing. Internalized knowledge gives you the ability to ask intelligent questions. That’s why you should remember what you learn.

I’m not opposed to digitally stored information. I use it often. I am saddened by the loss of internalized knowledge that digital hunting and pecking seems to encourage. Remembering requires commitment to remember. The ease of looking-things-up on the internet discourages memorization.

That’s the main drawback to digitized telling. There are three ways to tell, with three different effects on memory. People remember best what they hear. They remember less well what they read. They remember least what they learn from digital devices.

Everything searched digitally was first spoken or written. Digitized information is entered by a human hand. If it seems doubtful, check it out with the original research paper, document, audio-recording, or book. Most are available at any library.

We’re blessed to have our choice of all three ways of telling

By K. L. Shipley

Website: https://www.eclecticessays