This morning, as it does almost every morning, Facebook said good morning to me with a memory of mine.
It’s one of the only two functions for which Facebook still has value for me and both have to do with memory: the first is reminding me of the birthdays of people I know (in reality in most cases it doesn’t just remind me of them, but it makes me find out, like you I don’t know the birthdays of all the people I know); the second is to remember me something I did on that day many years ago.
In this case, ten years ago I went to my son’s school, who was in first grade, and he asked me to make him a paper airplane, and I did it, well because it flew; and by then all the other children wanted one too and soon the classroom was full of paper airplanes flying and happy children. It must have been beautiful, but I don’t remember it, even now Facebook presents me with what I wrote ten years ago.
If you wrote it you will have done it, my mother reassured me. It will be like this.
Smartphones are not just technological tools with which to connect and inform us, they are also a part of our mind, our mind outside our mind, our “extended mind”. The concept was coined by two researchers in 1998 who, to make it understandable, imagined the events of two boys who have to go to a famous museum in New York: one remembers the road; the other, who has Alzheimer’s, wrote everything down in a notebook. Was that notebook just a notebook or a part of the boy’s mind? A place where his memory resided?
In 1998 there were no smartphonesarrived in our lives ten years later, with the launch of the first one iPhone.
But today smartphones are exactly that: a part of our mind: not only a tool to connect to others and inform ourselves, but also a place where we keep information that we need to live better. Many things that we previously remembered “by heart” are now in the cloud, in the cloud where our smartphone data is located.
This is why we are so uncomfortable when for some reason we can’t use it: it’s as if a little piece of our mind goes off.