Simo / What It Replaced

Remembering numbers, and other skills that faded.

Some capabilities did not transfer to the new object. They simply stopped being practised.

Most people once carried a small store of telephone numbers in their heads: home, work, a parent, two or three friends, and the number of the place they had grown up. These were learnt by repetition, dialled on a keypad or a wheel, and available under any circumstance, including circumstances involving no equipment at all. Very few now hold more than one or two. The knowledge was not taken away. It stopped being rehearsed, because rehearsal happened only through use, and use ended the moment a list of names replaced a list of digits. Skills maintained purely by daily friction disappear when the friction goes.

The same happened to navigation from memory. Learning a city used to involve building a picture of it: this road runs north, the river is behind that hill, the third turn after the bridge. That picture was assembled through error, through overshooting a turn and correcting, through asking someone. Following turn by turn instructions builds a different and thinner thing, a sequence rather than a shape. People who have driven a route twenty times with instructions often cannot draw it. That is not a moral failing. It is what happens when the work of assembling the picture is done elsewhere.

The honest framing is trade rather than decline. What was gained is not small: nobody is lost in an unfamiliar suburb at night, nobody misses a connection because they misread a timetable, nobody loses touch with a person because a number was written on a thing that got thrown out. Set the memorised numbers and the mental maps against that and the ledger is genuinely arguable. The point is only that a trade was made, and that trades made without anyone noticing are worth naming afterwards, so the terms are at least known.