How The Net Changed My Memory Archiving Habits

Today’s fast pace of information has changed the way I sift through and store it. The action steps were too busy abruptly changing from analog to digital that my own memorization process became neglected. It was so gradual,that I didn't notice it until after the internet world was long established and many psychological case studies were done to reflect it’s after effects. In retrospect, it was happening before the internet exploded by way of cable television, consumer convenience, AM/FM radios, pharmaceutical companies, and even our diet. Instead of trying to memorize a passage in the book or remember an important statistic, I found myself spending more time deciding where to store the memory instead of storing and memorizing the memory itself. The internet changed our primary way of storing memorable happenings into instantly sharing moments on social media and then reading other’s reactions. Also, many websites that publish amazing information began to bulge my bookmarks bar into a hodgepodge of domain names almost impossible to navigate reliably. I still have trouble thumbing through my most visited URLs trying to find a blog post I didn’t have time to finish reading the day before. It’s frustrating because I feel like my reference material becomes too bloated to comb through efficiently, and retain to my own memory.My memories jumble more and more each day, and my brain fills with these to-do lists that each becomes a dusty I.O.U sitting where a motivating thought should have been instead.My attention span shortens, and I am simply scatter-brained. Moving on to the next matter at hand while leaving old ends left untied. I’ve tried to comb at these slippages recently and found that when I try to let more memories sink-in to deep thought, I also make it a point to store them in my hard drive as much as I do in the labyrinth of my brain and even mark it on a calendar connected to the cloud. As a result, I spend as much more time organizing them, making sure I can retrieve them on demand, as I do collecting them or simply living through life’s lessons. My memories are now just filed in folders, and are no longer as easily accessible—and searchable as I expected, while the need to search through them may never arise, so my extra foot work might as well be in vain. Just for peace of mind; and in case my memory of their location fails, I’ll have a redundant backup image that will bring facts back to light instead of a ghost of a departed thought. So, I believe...