Delivery and Memory

Delivery and memory are very important conventions in rhetoric that come into play often. Chapter 12 in ARCS played heavily (or so it seemed) off of the understandings of imitation in chapter 11. Mentioning that ancient rhetors used writing merely to aid them in their memory and delivery abilities as a secondary tool rather than a primary one because according to them, “spoken discourse was infinitely more powerful and persuasive than was written composition” (ARCS 325). Writing was still an emerging technology at least for uses in rhetorical conventions. Hypokrisis (or delivery in ancient Greek) came to later mean actor or the one who acted and this draws an interesting light towards what I mentioned in my last post about plagiarism and imitation. Here it seems that in classical times, delivery was based on memory of imitation which helped one to invent. This chapter also focused on ancient memory systems since it used to be much more important in the day today, whereas now we are externalizing our knowledge as a society. A naïve version of myself might have once argued that this would decrease our memory and science has shown that it does. However, I think that society’s ability to reference information is tenfold beyond what it was before. The internet has allowed us to focus less on the ability to memorize or imitate the actual material but rather now  people are more prone to focusing on the importance of being able to find the material. Education these days (though it may have also been this way in the past) is fully based upon teaching people to find the answers, not necessarily to remember them or invent them. However, this is only my personal opinion and may be a bit of a tangent. What do you guys think about referencing versus memory these days?