The Continuing Decline of Memory

By now, probably everyone's seen the Miss Teen South Carolina video (if not, it's easily found on YouTube). A few weeks ago, some people I was hanging out with were watching and critiquing both her clip and some of the responses to it.

Now let me start by saying that I actually feel sorry for the girl. She made it quite far in a beauty pageant--an accomplishment worth boasting about--and she had a proverbial blonde moment. Pretty much everyone has those. She just had the misfortune of having hers on national television in the YouTube generation. (I hope she has a sense of humor about this). This isn't even about Web 2.0, the viral spread of the clip, and the netizens having their say about this.

No, my friends, this is about rhetoric.

As we were discussing the video, one of the guys pointed out that he couldn't blame Miss Teen SC for being taken aback, though certainly he would have had a marginally better response: "You've got to be kidding me! Where did that statistic come from?" After all, one can hardly expect toddlers and Alzheimer's patients to be able to identify anything on a map.

Later, it struck me that there was more to it than that. We're living in the Information Age, right? Quite simply, we don't need to be able to identify something on the world map because we have Google to do it for us.

See, this is where it gets back to the rhetorical canons. Aristotle lists one of them as Memory--i.e., the rhetor had better know what he or she is talking about, and had better know it well. Think Homer, who most likely composed his epics orally, or the African griots, the oral historians. They trained their "memory muscles" quite successfully to the extent that their oral records would be considered just as accurate as most written ones in Western culture. Even Plato complained about how books degraded the mind. The Internet's just the next iteration of memory "destroying" tools.

But really, is this a problem? According to Pew Internet and American Life, in February 2007 47% of American adults had broadband at home. For those who don't have it, Wi-Fi's available in coffee shops, libraries, schools, and even bars. Ultimately, Internet access will likely be as ubiquitous as the television set, the CD player, the telephone, ad infinitum. Sure, there will always be have-nots, but probably most Americans will either have it, have relatively easy access to it, or be under a self-imposed ban.

That's not even touching on mobile devices, like cell phones. Although such things are perhaps less easy to use for internet access than, say, a laptop, they're still useful when, say, some random person holds a gun up to your head and threatens your life if you can't identify the U.S. on the map. Google will still pull through.

So this begs the question: is memory still even useful as a rhetorical canon? I can't truly answer that question, but would vaguely argue that it isn't, or at least that its usefulness is reduced. It may be time to define the rhetorical canons of the new technology. I'm sure new definitions are out there... if I remember to look.