THE MEMORY IMAGE IN A DIGITAL WORLD.
The other day as I filled a form for remuneration for university exam duty, the form required to fill details like Bank Account number, my registration ID as university examiner, the registration number of my vehicle, my contact number, etc. I realized that I had to take help of my document details in Mobile’s Personal Notes.
THE OVERWHELMING DIGITAL WORLD:
Even in my personal notes, there were so many passwords — one for College mail ID, another for personal links, still another for department, similarly bank details of SBI, PNB, and HDFC, passwords for ATM, Credit Card, etc. I was completely dwelling and diving deep in the digital world. I had to search for the relevant information in this labyrinth of pins and passwords I needed, and I felt low.
Why can’t I remember these personal details? I remembered minute details as a kid. What has gone wrong with me? I concluded that my memory is becoming like a sieve, my mind registered this better fact and I became so conscious that I endeavored to revise the registration number of my vehicle, my husband’s mobile, etc to ensure that I remember them all but every time I did so I had the urge to look at my personal notes in mobile, telling myself, “Why this hassle? “Why seek shelter in the comfort zone of the digital revolution?
A SHARP CONTRAST TO THE PAST:
The number conundrum didn’t end here and in the pursuit of remembering my dear one’s contact numbers, I felt it anxiety-inducing. Earlier it wasn’t like this. I remembered my roll number of class 10th, UG, and PG by heart and the number of landline phones of almost of all my friends.
In fact, in childhood, we remembered the house numbers of our friends, relatives, and postal addresses of dear ones were on tips, We had a sharp memory to recall immediately the pin code of our town and places where our grandparents lived. In fact, there used to be competition among cousins to recall such details conducted by grandparents. There used to be chanting of multiplication tables regularly and we memorized tables like parrots.
How the times have changed. Now for any such detail, we instantly seek help from our mobiles. It is so easy but once when I lost my mobile in college, I was totally aghast as I didn’t remember even the password for opening my Almira’s locker in the department. I wanted to call my husband and twice repeated my husband’s contact number as I wasn’t too sure about it. It made me panicky. What has gone wrong with me? Such poor memory I have developed, I was worried about my plight.
THE IMPACT OF THE DIGITIAL REVOLUTION:
Post the digital revolution, our minds are numbers-fatigued with user IDs, login passwords, transaction passwords, and pins, which we must keep changing periodically to avoid any mishap. I had even maintained a diary to record all the details but failed to update it regularly as data kept on increasing and ever changing. The culprit is none other than we, ourselves who have the habit of searching for everything through Google.
Use it or you lose it — this is perhaps what is happening with our memory. It is getting blurred everyday with our ever-increasing dependence on gadgets for our ease and comfort. The unused memory box suffers from dependence syndrome on the readily available ocean of information on our phone.
This may sound cliche that technology is a boom but in this era of Chat GPT and AI, we often get fatigued remembering our transition passcodes and pins. What we need to do is go back to the habit of noting down the details in a diary and update it weekly. This way we can keep our memory refreshed and once we write them on paper we tend to remember them. Nothing like paper to save the day.
