Gone and Forgotten

Remember the good old days? Back when memory referred to - the info that was stored in your brain and not your mobile phone? Me neither . . .

Etched in my brain for several years now has been the conclusion of an American researcher who believed technology was killing our memory. For the life of me I cannot remember his name. Which, I suppose, partially proves his point.

Yet it has never been a theory to which I have subscribed. Technology might make us lazy or more efficient, (I am thinking of the TV remote control here), but not forgetful.

Not withstanding the onset of old age, I reckon my old grey matter ticks along reasonably well within the boundaries my Maker gave me. Then last week came two discoveries to make me reassess the technology versus memory situation.

Firstly, my wife declared that despite the fact I have had the same mobile phone number for more than five years, she could not remember it if her life depended on it. Which, thankfully, it doesn't.

Then, in a bizarre episode, I was leaving a colleague a voicemail and I could not remember my own four-digit extension number. While I excuse this pathetic effort by saying I spend more of my time trying to remember Qantas departure times (who bothers with flight numbers?) than anything else, my lapsing noggin has given me reason to stop and reassess the theory that technology diminishes the memory.

If you go to a few crackpot Web sites, you'll see a thousand theories on how computers are our enemy, and if we treat them as friends they will destroy us and our brains. If you buy into that nonsense just for fun for a moment, then perhaps the greatest Weapon of Mind Disruption (WMDs) is the mobile phone.

A quick survey around a dinner table of six the other night revealed that every single person could remember their telephone when they were a kid; but no one could recite the extension number of their employer. Everyone hits the quick-dial key, of course; or avoids calling boss.

Most of us walk around with a PIN in our head so we can get cash from the hole-in-the-wall. On reflection, though, I do not so much remember the numbers as the little dance my fingers play on the ATM keypad. And even this basic use of memory may disappear shortly with the emergence of contact-less, smart credit cards. You won't tap in a number but wave a silicon chip at a reader.

These cards are so smart they undoubtedly hold the potential to make us more stupid.

They are increasingly popular in Europe and we'll be seeing much more of them down here in the next couple of years. But then, we have been predicting the dawn of mass smartcard adoption for so long, anyone could be forgiven for forgetting when the hype began.

Meanwhile in Britain, you will soon be excused for not knowing where you were last week, or even last night. Its government plans to store all its CCTV footage. Part of its game plan is to capture video of cars as they enter toll-zones. Up to two years of traffic footage will be stored - offering the potential, among other things, to make a TV show slightly more interesting than Who Wants to be a Millionaire.

And if you were a fervent night-clubber in Barcelona, you might have elected to have had an RFID chip injected into your forearm, just in case you forgot your name and age. (You'll have to imagine the circumstances in which that might happen.)

Our reliance on technology instead of our brain became painfully obvious recently when we decided the Commonwealth Games were more important than keeping our clocks in synchronization with Microsoft Mean Time (MMT). While other countries adjusted their times around their respective winter and summer seasons, we refused to budge for a week.

The result was pretty funny. Some people applied a patch that fixed things; others did not, or could not, and their Outlook calendar software and computer clock ran an hour late. We had a national fiasco of people arriving late or early for meetings. And what does that tell us - we rely on our computers to tell us where to go, not our brains.

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Technology is also having an impact on memory and the skills we retain and discard. I often marvel at those funny old guys who pop up on the ABC's The Inventors show with their array of wild, whacky and often pure-genius creations that could make the world a better place.

They are from a generation who loves their shed, not their computer. They learned their tactile skills 40 or 50 years ago from their father, an uncle, a kindly neighbour or during an apprenticeship when such things were more than cheap labour; not via online learning software thrust down a network pipe in the name of corporate education.

I wonder whether my generation or the ones following it will be able to sustain a show like The Inventors. I doubt it. The next generations are, and will be, different. Technology will have been a fundamental influence. The lack of need to use their memory for phone numbers, birthdays, PINs and so on does not enter their head. These are the individuals of the so-called New Economic Order.

A lot of them do not even care to know the time of day. If you wander through a university campus, you might notice an amazing number of students don't wear watches. At home, my eldest son cannot be persuaded to keep his Swatch Watch birthday present on his wrist for more than a couple of hours.

If you come across young, bright knowledge workers - especially those in youthful media and advertising companies, it is very possible they have rejected the normal executive adornment of an expensive Swiss watch advertised by a racing driver. The reason is simple: they don't care what the time is. They are more concerned with what they are doing with their time right now, not how fast it is ticking by. An interesting philosophy.

They also do not care to remember mindless facts and figures that can be stored on a mobile phone. And when Google can find you the finest stanzas of Wordsworth or the wonderful prose of TS Eliot in 0.07 seconds, who needs to commit them to memory?

Closer to home in your IT department, the same trends are emerging. In the coming five years, the need to remember how to code will diminish, too. Business process modelling tools will do to programming what HotDog (remember them?) and Microsoft's FrontPage did to hard HTML coding in the mid-90s.

Emerging process modelling tools in the hands of business leaders will do more to align business and IT objectives by 2010 than the evolution of IT specialists' business competence over the same period. Inevitably, the skills of coding will diminish as these new tools create yet another point-and-click environment.

Could it be that eventually these skills will be gone and forgotten? I see no reason why not. But the nature of humanity is to cast aside the old and embrace the new.

Perhaps it is more important to focus on what we will remember in the future than what we have forgotten from our past. That's pretty deep for the last sentence of an IT magazine - remember, you read it here!

Mark Hollands is a vice-president at the research and consulting organization Gartner