There is a ritual I perform on the drive over to a gathering of friends and acquaintances I haven’t seen in a while. Anticipating an evening filled with catching up on everyone’s lives, I take to Facebook to recall the names of children and the titles of jobs. It’s a way to recollect those fuzzy facts that hover at the periphery of my mind like vitreous floaters eccentric to my gaze. The more I try to recall such effervescent data on my own, the farther afield it seems to float away. I’m not entirely happy to have outsourced my memory to a technology, but it is an increasingly common phenomenon in these digital days and it makes me curious about what the downstream effects of such a radical shift in information storage and retrieval means for us all.

Read More