No revolution is without consequence.

I think it is important to keep that in mind as we progress through our current era of incessantly snowballing global technologies. Just recently, Google and other Internet companies have begun to upload books into large, free databases. Legal snags aside, it seems as if the wealth of literature throughout history is about to be accessible to anybody who can connect to the Internet.

With so much of the world now in the palm pilots of our hands, we have begun to see great changes in the way we learn and interact with the world. Already our memory for facts is fading away in our increasingly database-driven world, to be replaced with knowledge of how to acquire facts by navigating the sea of servers that can bring up 60,000 web pages referencing Sylvia Plath and organizing all that disparate information into a coherent picture. There is no longer a matriarch or town elder who can rattle off the history of a culture, because our world is far too big for that. Our talent now is not so much in retention but in the synthesis of information, which is constantly at our fingertips.

What always brings me back to reality is the physical manifestation of all this knowledge-what we commonly call the internet is still wires and vacuum tubes housed in large, beige and plaster warehouses where hundreds of servers come together and ceaselessly process data. The amorphous Facebook is all but metal and silicon.

At its best, the Internet will level the playing field by providing every person with the capability to discover any recorded bit of information. No longer would one have to be enrolled in higher education to learn about Near East archaeological excavations or eco-feminism. The connections all lie in corner coffee shops and in our cell phones.

But again, our revolution is not without turmoil. The overwhelming amount of essays and tweets buzzing around give us raw human ideas and information, unfiltered and vastly opined. As marvelous an insight into humanity as this is, it presents us with the daunting task of sieving through the unnecessary and piecing it all together into a synthesized, coherent picture, with no rules to guide us except our own personal convictions about reality. (It’s easy to see how the post-moderns will throw in the towel.)

Also, as groundbreaking as large databases of literature are, they overlook the great swath of human thought and innovation that dwell in cultures with oral traditions,whose mechanism of cultural memory and reproduction is myth, song and storytelling. With technology’s reputation as the only viable enterprise, all that will not willingly go digital is bound to be marginalized and, at worst, erased.

When humans went through the last technological revolution, we gave up close-knit agricultural lives for faster machines and more production. We can easily see the boons of our current technology, but as with all revolutions, we are also leaving something behind.

Roberta Singer is a junior in the College of Arts and Sciences.