Jon Udell: Mechanical Memory:

“We all like to joke, nowadays, about how Google has become humanity’s collective memory, and we’re properly grateful not to have to remember a lot of things that we know we can just look up. We’ve gone through this before, of course. Pre-Gutenberg, we routinely memorized vast amounts of verse. Then we learned to offload chunks of memory to print. Now we’re learning to offload a whole lot more memory to the Net. I’m not saying I’d have it otherwise, but sometimes I wonder about the tradeoffs we’re making.”