Assignment 1.2

The essay "Shame and Forgetting in the Information Age" by Charles Baxter was about the authors focus and importance put on memory. It showed that being smart and holding information is good but its better to hold experience and pair the two. Baxter started off his essay with an example of his handicapped brother, who was unable to retain information from books and writings but could remember faces and stories very well. Baxter then goes on to call this the Information Age because people now a days just go by books and internet and lose the old school experience of story telling and figuring out information. Since the new era is now the information age the people that cant cope with all the information memory that needs to be retained often feel embarrassed and ashamed of not being able to deal with it.

"There is more information all the time..." I strongly believe that Baxter is correct when he states this because there is so much information, who in the world can keep up with all this information if there is no experience behind it? No one and this forces everyone to start slowly relying on the technology more and more until its needed. "Tom was an outcast of the information age". Indeed Tom was an outcast of the information age because he, like i stated earlier, could simply not retain information. But Tom would not be an outcast of an era of story telling and experience because Tom had those traits and he was very capable of being normal in an experience era. Baxter presented this information and insight in five parts of the essay.

Also in the essay Baxter mentioned forgetting. "The shame of forgetting. The necessity of it." From this statement I got that forgetting is normal and that it is okay to forget. It almost seems to make you normal when you forget in the modern age of todays technological era. People get so caught in being perfect and not messing up that they forget what normal is. Its normal to mess up and its okay to be normal.

In conclusion Baxter is informing everyone that technology should be used as a crutch to help you remember things that are not grasped the first time around. People often use it for everything and it makes the brain lazy and useless. Baxter shows the negative side of over using technology and stresses the importance of experience information and shows how it should be put above technology and information memory.