Intoductioon Assignment #1.1

In Charles Baxter's essay "Forgetting and Shame in the Information Age, the author is trying to express the idea that society today is relying on technology information for everyday living and guidance. People that fall behind and cannot catch onto printed information is labeled as an outcast. Why? Maybe, because today's society depend too much on technology,and you have to keep up with everyone else. There is competition to see who has better memory, the kind of memory that can hold data information, not the memory that we can hold in our human brain. People turn to media for everyday news and presidential leadership. People turn to internet, magazines and books to gather facts and information. In warehouses and factories, people need scantron devices to keep track of shipment, delivery and orders. These days, memory data is keeping track of our memory for us, but are we going too far?
Neil Postman wrote, "We have transformed information into a form of garbage." Nowadays, t.v commercials portray forgetfulness as a shame. Baxter wrote (147); " One recent commercial, shown nationally, begin with a documentary footage of a young Canadian women in a large stage singing the Canadian Anthem. After about ten seconds, she begins to fluff her lines, A pause, while she looks embarassed and shamed face. She then stops singing. Cut to a voice-over, an annouonced saying, "Everybody needs a good night's sleep to perform well." We see a shot of the product, a mattress. Memory anxiety makes for a good business." In the Information Age people turn to technology for information and in this case the tv commericial is sending a message that forgetting is bad and people seem to be so hard on themself when they forget. The point is; there is always information out there and it is so easy to obtain, people think they should everything off hand which makes them so hard on themself. Walter Benjamin wrote (146) " Remembering data and remembering experience are two very different activities." In our society today there will always be data that and no one can absorb all the information, but people need to focus more on remembering experience for that is what will stick on them longer.

In an information age, forgetfulness is a sign of debility and incompetence (147)

Ronal Reagan, has become the central figure, the genius loci, the brawny poster-chil, of forgetfulness (147)

His high approval rating suggest that nobody really minds, that, in fact, the American people secrety approve. Clinton has become a hero of seslective data management. (149)