Bits and bytes agrees heartily! Do you?

Robert Pinksy, during an online conference in 1995 (hosted by The Atlantic), was asked the following question:

Question : "Memory" is a common term in our technical vocabulary--quantified in so many bits and bytes, to be "random-accessed" at will. But at the dawn of culture, poetry itself was memory. Now that computers do much of our remembering for us, are we less impelled to learn poems "by heart," to prove them upon our pulses, as Keats would have it?

He responded with

RPinsky136 : The human appetite for memory and entertainment is so immense that we seem to want to add every new technology we can; the model of one technology (TV, movies, cyberspace, whatever) replacing older technologies (print, poetry, memorization, etc.) seems to me faulty--it underestimates our ravenous appetite for All of the Above.

Agreed! Combine Carruth’s emphasis on careful attention with Pinsky’s estimation of our ravenous appetite, and all’s well (more or less).