A Commonplace Book

Before there was text, memory was all. Bards commonly held in mental suspension tens of thousands of lines of verse; sages were esteemed according to what they knew. Later, when text had arrived but not yet saturated the empire of possibility, an individual's knowledge -- what was stored at the beck of comprehending memory -- determined his or her standing and function in the society of the day. In Goethe's time -- the early nineteenth century -- a devoted person could still hope to know what was vital across the range of disciplines. So runs the cliché.

But after Goethe the sluices burst open. Nowadays no one person can hope to grasp more than a fraction of even a single topic area. The whole conception of what memory is, or could be, has been revolutionized, by which I mean to say exported. Human memory migrated into books and the classifying systems that gave a map for stored information. These paved the way for the database and the accessing tools of software. By degrees we have become comfortable with the idea that knowledge is less something had, or possessed, and more something available, to be gotten as needed. Our conception has changed, from internal to external. To be educated, increasingly, means to command the tools and principles of access. This is not to say that past a point one does not need to know what to do with the retrieved data. But still, effectively the paradigm has shifted.

... We are now in the age of hypersaturation; we are, sure as can be, entrusting most of what we think we need to know to a memory prosthesis.

This is the real point of the digital book -- its true revolutionary, or better, evolutionary, potential. What matters is not that some reader might carry Lord Jim around to read from his pocket screen, but that we will very soon begin to accept -- and then expect -- that we are not only never out of touch with people, at least potentially, but also that we are never apart from our information and ideas. The digital book points the way to the next step, storing a significant portion of our mental contents -- the data, or "intelligence" itself -- in an apparatus that is always ready at hand. We are putting a surprising new spin on what futurist Vannevar Bush (in the pages of The Atlantic Monthly) conjured up a half century ago with his "Memex," the mechanical device that would place all human knowledge within reach of the prompting finger.