Jane Jacobs in her book Dark Age Ahead talked of "mass amnesia" where even the memory of what is lost is lost. She was talking broadly across a wide range of pillars of society.
Nick Carr in his recent essay laments a bit more narrowly - what Google and the web generally are doing to our reading habits - and to our brains.
We all look back and talk about the good old days. NASA is finding as it prepares for its Orion program, institutional knowledge of large rockets disappeared with the passing of the German scientists who made the Apollo and Gemini programs successful in the 50s and 60s. Many a large company is waking up to the possibility of losing institutional knowledge in their aging, about-to-retire employee base.
I tend to be an optimist when it comes to technology progress. As Nick himself points out Socrates worried about the impact of printed books on civilization: "Socrates wasn’t wrong—the new technology did often have the effects he feared—but he was shortsighted. He couldn’t foresee the many ways that writing and reading would serve to spread information, spur fresh ideas, and expand human knowledge (if not wisdom).
It is fantastic to see my 14 year old ask to read classics - he is reading Tolstoy now after Cervantes. And it is even better to see him go to Wikipedia to check into something which he wants more information on. His parents don't have the answers. But someone out there does - or did and it was digitally captured. If anything, technology now allows to not forget what we have forgotten. And even more importantly share what we have learned wider and cheaper than we ever were used to.
What good are the good old days if they don't make the good new days better?
