The document discusses the issues with storing and sharing all of our memories online. It notes that people are sharing twice as much online each year as the previous year due to social media. However, constantly posting online can create "unreal" memories and cause people to trust external written records over their own memories. The document warns that if we outsource our memory to the internet, we risk losing our ability to remember and know things ourselves.
7. every year, people share twice as much online than they did the year before. Zuckerberg's Law:
8. what is the problem with storing and sharing all our memories?
9. "[teaching people to write] will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality." Socrates (360 BC)
18. “ the extent to which people use social networking and promote themselves online will become more important in determining their careers than what school or university they went to.”
19. “ If you don’t brand yourself, Google will brand you” in: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Branding Yourself
20.
21. 94% of you have family members with Facebook profiles
26. “ Entering cyberspace can be a sign of an authentic search for personal encounters with others, provided that attention is paid to avoiding dangers such as enclosing oneself in a sort of parallel existence, or excessive exposure to the virtual world. In the search for sharing, for ‘friends’, there is the challenge to be authentic and faithful, and not give in to the illusion of constructing an artificial public profile for oneself.”
27.
28. 78% of you are honest or very honest when posting information about yourself online
39. “ We do not live in a society that uses digital archiving, we live in an information society that is a digital archive.”
40.
Editor's Notes
Jesuit priest and historian Walter Ong (1982) argues in his history of the transition from orality to literacy that the written word restructures consciousness in ways that make it more difficult to remember communication - as it is inevitably distanced from whomever expressed it.
Peter Sloterdijk (2004) performs a contemporary iteration of Socrates' critique, questioning blindness to the experience (of others) of a life inside one's own mediasphere - a sphere of lived experience that simultaneously stretches the globe as it envelops the lifeworld of the individual.