The Death of Memory!

Two years to the dawn of a new century that witnessed the anxiety of being able to boot up your home PC at the turn of the century, also saw among other things the extinction of the wisdom of many a grandmas across households, the extinction of the reference sections in libraries, the extinction of Mr. / Ms. Know it all’s in the class rooms, in short the extinction of the beautiful world of memory.

It also marked the birth of the high bandwidth know it all’s, the virtual gurus, the tell- me-all friend,and the dump-your-memory friend.

Overnight one was enlightened about the what’s, why’s, when’s, which’s, how’s of the happenings around us. We were the so called empowered society when a toddler all of 2 hand held us to the world of information overload at the turn of the century and at a click.

A generation that grew up being told that Knowledge was Power was elbowed out by a generation that claimed Information is Power as long as the electrical power and connectivity existed. There is a world of difference between knowledge and information.  Sadly the speed at which information was disseminated was more important than the quality of the information that was being spread. The advancements in hardware kept pace and ensured they facilitated uninterrupted dissemination of ‘uncontrolled’ information.

All this happened because one Sergey a Russian and Larry an American decided that they would bid adieu to the cold war, their countries were at and give democracy a new twist and empower mankind with information.  Democracy sadly gave freedom to everything except the right to uncontrolled information.  Uncontrolled information sounded nice but when the source of uncontrolled information passed its early life entered adolescence and crossed over to the teens, now out of the teens realized uncontrolled information was irresponsible information too.

As we suffer from various health hazards associated with poor lifestyle and eating habits as a result of our consumption patterns we also suffer from an acute information obesity / disorder due to the consumption of junk, so called intellect influencing steroids like misinformation, disinformation and mal-information that are so beautifully camouflaged under empowerment or right to information.

The facilitator of all this, turns twenty today, and hope they leave the teeny tantrums behind and focus on a more responsible dissemination of information. The brand became a verb before they reached the responsible 20’s and hope they remain a responsible mental verb.

The need of the hour is a mature and responsible GOOGLE. We need exponential efforts in 100’s as the name suggests, to help foster a responsible society.

 

Many Happy returns of the day Google… thank you for returning all our queries till date.