Memory

62.jpgWe increasingly live in a world that forgets. Companies have almost no sense of their own history while politicians positively revel in the fact that voters cannot remember (or choose to forget) lies, deceptions and even criminal behaviour. This is a problem because power is essentially a battle between memory and forgetting. Unfortunately, memory loss is a by-product of trends like speeding-up and convergence. It means that attention spans can almost be measured in nano-seconds (have you noticed how members of Generation Y won’t wait for anything anymore?). This in turn may give rise to memory loss in older age (cue various technical and pharmaceutical solutions). Conversely, we are also becoming increasingly fixated with preserving our own memory. ‘Life caching’ is a major trend (and a US $2.5 billion industry) where people effectively download (or upload) everything from emails and text messages to photographs, video clips, words and spoken words. Similarly scrap booking is a hot trend at the moment, although one suspects that this might have more to do with nostalgia and relaxation than immortality. Links: http://www.nokia.com/lifeblog

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