One of the constants of human history has been the embodiment of various human mental skills and needs in our tools. The 30,000 year-old calendars of Marshack mentioned previously were an early example of this, as were the accounting tokens described by Denise Schmandt-Besserat that just preceded writing. Both were means of investing a part of our memory in physical objects. Writing greatly intensified this trend, but only in the last hundred-and-fifty years, with the advent of mechanical and electronic recording, have we have greatly increased the pace. Today we stand at a crossroads, for companies such as Intel are seriously contemplating neural computing interfaces by 2020. Even if they are off by as much as Bell was in the 1960s about the advent of practical picture phones, that is by about thirty years, the realization of a direct connection between your brain and cyberspace is likely to happen by 2050 or so.
Of course it might prove impractical, but we already have practical, though limited, wearable computers today. How quickly they will catch on is anyone's guess, but I think five to ten years is a good guess. (But, like Alonzo Gray's opinion of machine guns, I may be completely missing the mark.) My point is, that the present situation, in which we locate more and more of our memory in personal electronic devices and in clouds of computer servers online, is going to greatly intensify this process of offloading our mental processes. We cannot know what that will look or be like, but for the historian, it opens up a golden opportunity, one in which we may gain new insights into how the processes of externalization work, and allow us to apply them to the past. That is if all the information we experience does not drive us crazy.
For more on this, see: "New Ways of Remembering" on the MU eLearning Blog.
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