Interesting edition of Thinking Allowed. Laurie’s newsletter about forgetfulness focussed light-heartedly on the aging process of finding it harder to remember names and faces. In fact the subject matter is more about cultural change and the evolution of greater difficulty in remembering generally – a book by Paul Connerton.
Not simply displacement by overload in the information age – but primarily a loss of a sense of place since the industrial revolution. We cannot mentally attach memory images to stable locations in our environment. Major construction projects used to take lifetimes, and entire home towns and cities our daily locations could be held in view for a lifetime. With construction projects driven by increasingly distibuted economies, locations change and we travel between them so much more day by day, year by year. We are less stably “situated” and have less fixed phsyical hooks in our environment on which to hang mental images that make remembering natural. Interesting idea.