Google, Memory and the Academy

I wonder what some Greeks thought when Vergil wrote the Aeneid. Not that it was a rip off of Homer but is was written, on paper. Homer was memorized, and when spoken, was done in a poetic manner. For those few of us who studied Vergil, and had to translate him, we remember memorizing that introduction, in a sing song manner. But Rome wrote things, lots of things, and copied them again and again.

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris
Italiam, fato profugus, Laviniaque venit
litora, multum ille et terris iactatus et alto
vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram;
multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem,     

inferretque deos Latio, genus unde Latinum,
Albanique patres, atque altae moenia Romae. 

Now this week in Science some researchers bemoan Google, as I suspect some Greeks bemoaned the Romans and their scribes. they state:

The advent of the Internet, with sophisticated algorithmic search engines, has made accessing information as easy as lifting a finger. No longer do we have to make costly efforts to find the  things we want. We can “Google” the old classmate, find articles online, or look up the actor who  was on the tip of our tongue. The results of four studies suggest that when faced with difficult  questions, people are primed to think about computers and that when people expect to have future  access to information, they have lower rates of recall of the information itself and enhanced recall instead for where to access it. The Internet has become a primary form of external or transactive memory, where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.

And they conclude:

We are becoming symbiotic with our computer tools, growing into interconnected systems that remember less by knowing information than by knowing where the information can be found. This gives us the ad- vantage of access to a vast range of information, although the disadvantages of being constantly “wired” are still being debated. It may be no more that nostalgia at this point, however, to wish we were less dependent on our gadgets. We have become dependent on them to the same degree we are dependent on all the knowledge we gain from our friends and co-workers—and lose if they are out of touch. The experience of losing our Internet connection becomes more and more like losing a friend. We must remain plugged into know what Google knows.

This may be some interesting bemusings that one may hear at a Cambridge coffee house, but frankly is in my opinion misses the mark by a galactic distance. One still remembers Planck's constant, the charge of an electron, the speed of light the length of a carbon bond and even the phone number of ones first girlfriend. Even though that number no longer works and even if it were 55 years ago! Will Google replace all that, hardly, it can enhance that.

A lawyer at trial cannot stop his cross to check a site, a surgeon cannot go check Google to see just where that Trigeminal nerve really goes, and many other things of this sort. Interesting bar talk, but research, in Science, peer reviewed!