Frank Schirrmacher: We are apparently now in a situation where modern technology is changing the way people behave, people talk, people react, people think, and people remember. And you encounter this not only in a theoretical way, but when you meet people, when suddenly people start forgetting things, when suddenly people depend on their gadgets, and other stuff, to remember certain things. This is the beginning, it's just an experience. But if you think about it and you think about your own behavior, you suddenly realize that something fundamental is going on. There is one comment on Edge which I love, which is in Daniel Dennett's response to the 2007 annual question, in which he said that we have a population explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them.
Decius: The fundamental ideological fallacy in our society is the idea that maximizing property rights makes people in general more wealthy. In fact, a society can achieve its greatest wealth potential by maximizing innovation, which is a different value than property rights and the two are not always aligned.
Cory Doctorow: The Dude is the easiest way to share stuff with your friends and other contacts, and it's also a great way to meet people who think like you.
David Lynch: So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?
David Clark, on "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age": If the gathering, storage, and processing of information puts us all in the center of a digital panopticon, the failure to forget creates a panopticon crossbred with a time-travel machine. Victor Mayer-Schoenberger catalogs the range of social concerns that are arising as technology favors remembering over forgetting, and offers some approaches that might give forgetting a respected place in the digital world. Read this book. Don't forget about forgetting.
The Age of the Informavore |