So of course the week I volunteer to be one of the class discussion leaders I have nothing. The reading was not cool or interesting and I had the hardest time coming up with something dynamic to engage my class. Yay for me! The following is my attempt at questions to stimulate the discussion my class will have later:

Before reading this I had never thought of the computer as an encyclopedia, but now more than ever we turn to our computers whenever we have questions. Nine out of ten conversations I have with my mother at some point one of us says, “let’s just google it.” Our computers remember everything for us. I know only two phone numbers by heart, my mother’s and my grandmother’s. I have hundreds of numbers stored in my phone though. Not just phone numbers but email addresses and physical addresses as well. I don’t even try to remember things anymore. I just store them on my computer and go on with my day.

Do our computers allow us to forget everything?

In a different class we talked about the idea of trust. We just trust that our machines and networks will work properly although we don’t really understand how they work or know how to repair them if the malfunction. A primary example is an ATM. We simply trust that the ATM and its network will just know that we deposited $200 and our online bank account will reflect.

Do we trust these machines to remember forever?

We know these. They’re all over campus. And when we see them we assume that when we use them they will work.

What happens on that God forsaken day when we wake up and the computers have decided to forget everything too?