The technological advancements of the past century are positively astounding when you think about it. The creation of computers-creating ways of storing the information that we can’t keep in our heads, giving us the ability to perform complex tasks in seconds-coupled with the advent of the internet-allowing us to communicate instantly across vast distances with any number of people-has created some drastic changes to humanity.

Socially, we have created a feeling of instant gratification, the ability for us to instantly watch any video we want through YouTube or buy anything we could want without leaving the house and have it delivered to our door the next day through amazon. Physically, we have changed our brains, evolving with the advancing technology, to move portions of our memory out of our head and into the hard drives of our computers, giving us the ability to recollect any piece of information verbatim so long as we are within reach of our keyboards.

The problem with this is, I seem to have been struck last night with a serious case of external amnesia.

My laptop’s hard drive burnt itself out last night, beyond the point of repair. My options are to either buy a new hard drive, windows, office, and an antivirus, or get a new computer. I have potentially had albums of music and pictures, entire classes worth of documents, essays, papers, and research, YEARS of writing samples, and any number of video games, save files, and other applications.

In other words, I can’t remember a thing right now.

Our societies reliance on our external memories has some rather glaring issues. As I’m experiencing right now, the possibility to lose thousands of dollars and thousands of hours worth of time and money is a real threat that we seem to not take that seriously. I hope that my information got backed up onto my external hard drive (i.e. my external external memory), and if it hasn’t, what can I do? I am forced into a situation that requires me simply to say “I’ve lost years of my life, and I have to move on.”

If we lose our internal memory, this isn’t even a choice. Loss of internal memory simply isn’t something that anyone cope with, there are certain things that just don’t come back. I wrote down all of my stories, essays, and research because I don’t have the brain capacity to remember all of it, but now that my external memory has decided to forget all of that, how is any different from losing my internal memory?

I could be over-reacting, computers crash all the time. But maybe we should consider the possibility that we have become too reliant on our external memories.

image courtesy of technabob.com