One of the troubles with putting a website to sleep is you have difficulty finding a topic interesting enough to be worth waking it up for. Each whack at the snooze button makes trivial posts about nothing that much sillier.

I’ll have more to say about New York over the coming weeks, but this is just a kind of funny side observation from my time in the city, unrelated to the city itself. (For the impatient, there are a handful of pictures [here](http://uwaterloo.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048402&l=1f918&id=122603642) and [here](http://uwaterloo.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2048715&l=156ca&id=122603642))

And it has to do with memory.

One of the great things about the Waterloo campus is the Wi-Fi coverage. You can pick up a signal pretty much anywhere, including the westerly parts of the plaza. Not so with New York. Despite the [apparent proliferation of hotspots](http://www.auscillate.com/wireless/manhattan/), there weren’t any times I was able to just quickly log on, even in places like Times Square, where you’d kind of expect *someone* to be providing a free connection, at least by accident. (I asked some random guy if there was wireless internet available anywhere, and he was like, “what do you think this is, Europe?”)

The thing about Wi-Fi at Waterloo is, it conditions me not to bother writing anything down. *What the heck*, I say, *I can just pull up the address again once I’m in the right building*. Not only do I not write things down or commit them to memory, I think I deliberately don’t bother, knowing that my computer knows.

This seems unremarkable, but I remember some years ago my Dad saying similar things about his Palm device. That, rather than serving as a reminder tool, it was actually eating away at his mid-term memory. He could digest large quantities of information off it in short order for immediate use, but after a few moments, the only copy was back in his pocket.

I couldn’t help wondering if the wide availability of the Internet, and further availability of powerful search tools will erode my generation’s ability to remember things.

I’ve said before that reading a site like [reddit](http://reddit.com/) is like trying to sip from a firehose. It’s such a tidal wave of random, disconnected information, how could one possibly internalize it all? Instead, for myself at least, I skim some portion of the articles on the front page, and the trivia from the most interesting few become conversation fodder in the following day. The rest, instantly forgotten.

This may not seem so different from watching televised news, or reading a paper, but I think there’s something about the speed of fact-finding on the Internet that makes it a much more dangerous resource in this regard. Not only is there the reddit firehose as a jumping-off point, but for further exploration, there’s the vast depth of Wikipedia, and even the broader web itself.

With respect to my work on Google Maps in the coming term, I could think of at least three instances recently where I could remember the *approximate location* of something, but neglected to note either a precise intersection or a precise address. (Fortunately, only one of them caused me to be seriously late for appointment, and the other party was very understanding…)

This may be a case of me trying to paint my own mental laziness as some kind of phenomenon, but I wonder how widespread such a thing could be. A few quick Googles turn up nothing, but then, how would one even go about trying to measure or study such a thing?

Mike

← Earlier Later → Posted at 7:32 pm to Internet, Soapbox.