Generational Amnesia
The term “ghost knowledge” refers to information and understandings that exist or have existed within the minds of people who for some reason no longer make that information or those understandings available to other people.
This may be because the one person at a mechanic shop who knew how to repair a very specific component of an older, very niche model of car has retired.
It may be that the one administrative worker responsible for filing a collection of paperwork that’s only accessed and updated once a decade was downsized or passed away.
The unfortunate reality is that when knowledge becomes ghost knowledge, we collectively lose that knowledge, for all practical purposes.
It’s as if the time invested in learning it just disappeared, instead of becoming a long-lasting asset that serves the relevant community long into the future.
Scaled up and applied to different types of groups, this is sometimes called organizational or institutional amnesia; the opposite of organizational memory.
Within such organizations, this issue is often only recognized in the midst of a crisis.
Sprawling business interests that survived a war, for instance, will have an advantage if another war breaks out because of what they learned the first time around—but only if they can “remember” those lessons by encouraging employees to pass them on to other employees, or to future employees via some other more formal, archival mechanism.
Organizations that struggle through a scandal, likewise, will invest time, energy, and resources in making it through that scandal, and many of those investments will prove valuable if another scandal emerges in the future.
If their institutional memory fails to retain that hard-earned information, though, the second time around will be just as difficult and slapdash as the first: nothing will have been gained long-term from those earlier investments.
Generational amnesia is similar in that it refers to whole societies “forgetting” certain truths, certain ways of doing things, and some of our collective ancestral understandings over time.
We tend to forget, for instance, that every single generation we’ve ever identified and labeled has badmouthed the subsequent generation; this “kids these days effect” has been identified through historical assessment, but we seldom note it as we’re doing it, because each new generation—from our contemporary perspective, lacking historical context—seems uniquely bad.
Large-scale societal amnesia of this kind can be dangerous because it can cause us to forget previous norms, replacing them with new ones that fail to take historical precedent into account—shifting baseline syndrome—and that, in turn, can blind us to potentially harmful changes to those norms over time.
Forgetting what it’s like to live in a world that is unconnected by the internet and other such always-on technologies that are casually accessed through an array of easy-to-use devices, for instance, can distance us from other ways of living, other ways of communicating and engaging and connecting.
This can limit our range of thinking because we may come to have trouble imagining a world in which we’re not all nodes in such networks: that could become the default starting point of our thinking, rather than a single branch on a many-branched tree.
We can also, over time, forget what it was like to have passenger pigeons flying around—a species that was formally declared to be extinct in 1914.
We can forget what it’s like to have temperatures within a certain range, and weather events of a certain magnitude.
We can forget—very quickly, as it turns out—what it’s like to live in a world without antibiotics, an antimicrobial treatment that was only introduced in its most rudimentary form in 1928 (more than a decade after the extinction of the passenger pigeon), but which has since changed essentially everything about modern medical practices.
As a consequence of overprescription, overuse, and misuse of antibiotic substances, we are identifying more and more “superbugs” that are immune to most, or in some cases all, currently available antibiotics.
Which means that there could be, at some point in the near-future, a period in which treatments of this kind are no longer reliable, at least not in the same way they are today. And we may find ourselves fumbling through tough, pre-1928 medical realities with which folks living today have no direct experience, and potentially, no organizational memory-based experience, either.
That’s problematic because, lacking methods of passing on such understandings, we could find ourselves scrambling to re-learn things we’ve already invested so much in learning, previously. We could also fail to notice slow changes in environmental patterns that we might have otherwise noted and possibly been able to fix before they spiraled into something devastating and unfixable.
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