I have been asked more than a few times, why I don't write down my thoughts.
Equally, I have been suggested to buy a memory storage-device (a kind of personal planner), which will keep track of my impending appointments and schedules, so that I do not miss any of these latter. "It is impossible that you will remember all your future commitments! This little device will remember them for you." But how will it remember? What if I forget to even look into the planner? Who will tell me to refer to the planner about things I have supposedly forgotten? If it is necessary that I should remember here, if my memory is left alone here, then I will dare to remember my entire schedule. Away with the planner!
Technology here as elsewhere quantifies memory. In effect it says, "You should remember only to look into this device... the rest the device does for you. You do not have to remember all those excessive details about your schedules, which is hard and cumbersome for you to remember!" But who says memory works this way - that it has quantitative limitations? Even if it has these limitations, are these limitations been tested? Isn't the limiting line drawn by this technological device, at best, an arbitrary estimation? Arbitrary and seductive, that it seduces the present-day lazy ones to "adjust" their limitations to the line prescribed by this device. What started out as a cushion, an auxillary, an extra-padding, now becomes the combatting device!
But this is not limited to "technology" as in gadgets and electronics. The majority of mankind has always been "technological" even before gadgets were invented. How else does one explain the amazement with which one gapes at a math wizard, who can multiply two six digit numbers in the blink of an eye? Is this amazement not that of a softenend mind which claims appreciation of the other as the consolation of a self-defeat? What next? - writing because one has to think?
