Is Your Phone Your Memory?

Do you know by heart the number of the person you love most? Maybe not. It's all on your phone. Almost 2,400 years ago, someone warned this would happen. He wasn't talking about phones.

He was talking... about writing. So the question is: does writing make us smarter... or more forgetful? Let's go back.

Before any letters. Without writing, everything a people knows has to fit in one head. Laws, remedies, the grandparents' stories. Almost all human history was like that. How does it fit?

Through rhythm, rhyme and repetition. It's the drum's redundancy, now working for memory. You forget yesterday's shopping list... but sing a song from fifteen years ago. Memory loves music.

First problem: the mind is great at stories... and terrible with numbers. In Uruk, a growing city needed to track barley debts. They began with clay balls, one per measure, stored in an envelope... also made of clay.

To check, they marked the balls on the outside. Then someone noticed: if the mark is outside... why keep the balls inside? That's the best-known theory of how writing began. The first thing written wasn't a poem.

It was an account. One of the first written names appears on a barley account: Kushim. But it may not be a name. It could be a job title. The first name in history might be...

a clerk's. A whole sentence about more than barley? Only about 700 years later. First writing learned to count. Then to speak.

And it wasn't a one-place fluke. In China, writing arose from scratch, without Mesopotamian contact. On bones and turtle shells, used to ask fire about the future. The question... and answer, written on the same bone.

The idea was too good to be invented only once. Then came the complaint. In Athens, Plato wrote a dialogue where Socrates tells a story. An Egyptian god brings letters to the king, proudly: "a remedy for memory!" The king says what still holds: inventors are not best judges of their work.

And he answers: no. It's a remedy for remembering... not for memory. Those who trust letters will stop exercising their own minds. And seem wise...

without being so. There's a second complaint almost no one recalls. Socrates compares text to a painting: it looks alive... but ask it a question, and it falls silent. Or repeats the same thing.

A text does not answer. Remember that complaint. It returns at the end of the series. And of course, this critique of writing reached you... in writing.

Then time speeds up. 2008: an American magazine asks on its cover: "Is Google making us stupid?" Today the same question shifts target: what about artificial intelligence? Could it make us seem wise... without being so?

With every new technology, Socrates' complaint returns... in new clothes. So, was Socrates right? Partly, yes. Writers store less in their heads.

Your phone knows more phone numbers than you do. But notice what he didn't see. Socrates' memory died with him. His words, written by another, reached us. Each generation began where the last left off.

A written idea stays still long enough to check... and disagree. That's how we learned to correct what we know. Writing made us forget phone numbers... and remember Socrates for 2,400 years.

Memory left the mind. That's why it endured. But written words pile up. And pile up. And pile up.

With so much written... how do you find anything? The answer starts with an ox... upside down. This story is told by XMACNA.

Its new page: Digital Employees putting this intelligence to work... under your control. Follow XMACNA so you don't miss the next episode. The Information. Episode three: The word that stays.

Inspired by The Information, by James Gleick. Read the book.