When We Are No More: How Digital Memory Is Shaping Our Future

We hold that democracy demands equal access to goods, services, and knowledge. The culture of knowledge in America has been a servant of democratic governance. This instrumental view of knowledge meant that three principles would become fundamental to American-style democracy: The press must be free, the government must be open and accountable to t

But the sense of meaning only arises from the context of what we perceive. Interactive timelines, maps, charts, and infographics are common now in presentations and online newspapers. They allow people to grasp the import of information quickly by arranging data schematically in a variety of contexts to reveal relationships.

Digital data are completely dependent on machines to render them accessible to human perception. In turn, those machines are completely dependent on uninterrupted supplies of energy

it is our emotions that tell what is valuable for our survival and well-being.

Creativity flows from the suspended state of mind in which knowledge is nothing and attention is everything.

Even as Jefferson was president, the Age of Reason was yielding quickly to the Age of Matter, when empirical science rigorously based on evidence superseded natural philosophy and natural history.

The default of digital memory—not

Our ancestors, on the other hand, communicated through language and gesture, song and dance. They led rich interior lives, creating ideas, images, and wholly imagined realities that shaped their interior worlds just as deftly as their tools made clothes to keep them warm and huts to shelter them.

The realm of emotional intelligence, empathy, and imagination—all necessary for judgment in the context of incomplete information or conflicting aims—is beyond the reach of our machines.