We Are Forgetting

I think we are in the process of forgetting a lot of the things we used to know. The irony is that everything is recorded and stored in someway nowadays. With this constant storage and compiling we don’t think we are forgetting anything. It feels like knowledge is readily accessible and that we are in no danger. However, this is far from the truth.

Imagine a room filled with paper. There are sheets of it everywhere. Every sheet has some historical significance. Every page offers some truth about the world we live in. Every page is relevant is some way.

Now a lot of this information isn’t something that particularly interests you. That doesn’t mean that it isn’t important. But you walk over the pages and throw them to the side. You search for something that you want.

You search and search. You flip through pages and pages of material hoping that the next page will give you something. If not, you quit.

Do you ever feel like that?

I know that I do. Sometimes while doing a web search, I come up empty. I waste tonnes of time and never find anything remotely close to what I wanted. I give up and create the material for my classroom myself or I just move on to a different topic.

I wish there was a better way to find information on the World Wide Web. I haven’t found it yet. Search engines will often let me down. I know the information is out there but if I can’t find it, it’s pretty much useless.

If the knowledge is there but lost, isn’t it like we have forgotten it. Does that make sense?


5 responses to “We Are Forgetting”

  1. Totally makes makes sense. It’s like the tree that fell in forest but that no one saw. It didn’t really fall.

    OK, so that’s a bad analogy. Because it did indeed fall, but it didn’t really matter that it fell. Knowledge too, when it falls in the forest and is lost is equally forgotten and equally useless.

  2. Hi Chase, I think it does make sense. Some scientists argue that we don’t forget anything, that it’s all stored in our brain. But if you can’t remember it, it’s as if you never learned it, because you just can’t gain access to the information.

  3. Hi Oktober Five,

    There just has to be a better way to store information so that it is easily accesible online. Or else it really is useless.

    Hi Marelisa,

    I’ve heard that theory before and it makes sense, but I forget stuff all the time. I can’t find things I want to online either. Access is what is important and there has to be a better way to get at this information. I can’t be the only person thinking along these lines.

    Hi Silverfish,

    That’s hilarious. Have you read it? It might be an interesting read but I don’t think it would solve my problem here.