Every major transition in communications has an effect on the way people think. Proof of the pudding is easy to cook up. For example when people began to write, they lessened their dependence on memory.
Imagine the early civilised human endlessly reiterating directions, recipes, truisms and names, just so nothing of value would be forgotten – well we see that in rhymes, epic poems like the Iliad, and the begot and begat lists of the Bible.
Language at that point is imbued with mnemonic devices like alliteration and rhyme. That argument was first presented by people like Eric Havelock (The Muse Learns to Write) and Walter Ong (Orality and Literacy).
Once people learned to write – or at least when writing became pervasive within a social group - the purposeful inner dialogue changed.
The mind was released from its copious and continuous memory tasks and began its slow transition into the variegated potential we’ve seen realised since classical antiquity: literature, maths, objective science, philosophy, pragmatic technology. A mind bedevilled by remembering cannot spare the time for these activities.
But once you have a computer, which does all the memory work for you, what then?
The question isn’t just confined to how you and your memory might possibly change when you are further liberated from memory tasks.
Memory tasks are deeply social as well as personal. Collective memories usually led to some form of memorialisation, the 'Lest We Forget' type symbols of past struggles, sacrifices, and heroism that are dotted around cities, the countryside, and Mount Rushmore, among other places.
And they are social in the sense that oral uses of language are generally pertinent to a society’s political life.
Shakespeare was a great writer in part because he reflected the conflicts of the society of his day by writing about old Denmark, Rome and Egypt. Language used to be so allusive, symbolic and ambiguous and therein lay its power. It had many masters to serve and rarely has the task of exposing corrupt political relationships been a welcome one.
A point that Havelock makes astutely is that epic poetry was used to reveal corruption in oblique ways. The pleasure of the Homeric performance was seeing the well-to-do exposed, but discreetly.
A further feature of memory is creativity. Because memory is so closely allied to traditional forms of expression it has been viewed by many experts as the seat of creativity (the thesis is explored in various books by Stephen Bertman, particularly his Cultural Amnesia).
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