Future Modelling

Models are anything that give shape to ideas. May it be a reproduction of a car, or the communication models I have sketched at the bottom of this page. Modelling, as Andrew Murphie taught, serves to express, explain, and control. During times of war, each party will model their attack to control their troupes. Media will divulge the message to every party, by telegraph, telephone or messengers. Modelling can also be used for good, to organise a person's life and help them expand their day's potential. Making a to do list is a very common way to model a day in advance. This idea of trying to organise the future is taken by Chris Frith who expresses that "we are constantly modelling future events." Digital media aim to help us do that more and more. Smartphones applications help budgeting, saving, reminding and making to do lists. With all this mediatic effort put into organising the future, it is hard to live in the present. An example would be the TripViewLite for smartphones, where one can track their buses at all time from their small screens. In the past, people used to go to the bus stop, see when the next one is coming and potentially wait for quite a while. Today, a tap of a button can tell you to the minute when your next bus or train is coming, and how late or early it will be. This creates a big change to planning the future, and modelling one's future according to when their transport will arrive. It is made very easy to look into the future with applications such as this one. Memory is as well not nearly as needed as it used to be. Someone can aim to remember at what time their bus is going to come, but it is no longer necessary; so why bother? Plato explained that by not using our memory and exteriorising, through writing or lists, what we should remember, we lose knowledge. He called it hypomnesis. Before cell phone existed, one had to type in someone's phone number every time they needed to call them. After a few times, it was easy to remember by heart one's number. Nowadays, there is no need to do so, and people might not know by heart the phone number of the people they call the most.