Great thanks to Jean Bomeisl, for forwarding the article from SmartPlanet, "Using the Internet Affects Your Memory, Study Says," to start a discussion.
It's a fascinating read, but that's got to be the most misleading title for an article ever.
It should read, "humans choose to remember written facts more if we know they will be erased later," or "we change which information we store in our brains if we have access to external storage." But that's not very sexy, or scary.
The studies show nothing at all about the Internet.
They don't even reflect badly on computers, since they did not vary participants' exposure to either the Internet or computers themselves. You'd likely see the same effects if you took computers completely out of the studies -- if you asked participants to write things down in a notebook, and told some of them the notebook would be burned later (this is borne out anecdotally by the story of the husband and wife at the end; each of whom selectively chose not to store information they expected the other spouse would have remembered for them). The only way to actually measure the effects of the Internet is to compare two groups, one which uses computers, and one which uses an older technology -- paper notebooks, parchment, or fingerpaint -- to try to record information.
This article is either an example of sloppy experiment design, or just incredibly glib and shoddy reporting -- or editing -- which caters to people's fears that "the Internet makes us dumber."
That's an easy sell, because the idea that a new technology will make us dumber and erode our memory is not a new fear: Socrates argued that if people learned how to read and write, it would "introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external" (as recorded by Plato, in Phaedrus).
Sound familiar? The truth is, Socrates was probably right -- we surely depend less upon our memories than the ancients did -- think of the griots of West Africa, or the Homeric storytellers who memorized days' worth of stories. But does this mean we're actually less intelligent for it? Very few of us would argue that basic literacy has made humans dumber. And how would this apply to the Internet, which simply supplies us access to more and more writing?
The Internet may in fact be making us dumber, but this group of studies doesn't show it; rhetoric like this sort of tongue-in-cheek fear mongering just muddies the water. If anything, these studies show the remarkable ability of the human brain to conserve resources and 'outsource' brute memory tasks to external tools.
Another possibility is that the Internet is making journalists dumber, but I doubt it -- we just have access to a greater volume of reporting, both good and bad. Maybe it's good that we know that this article will be online forever -- we can choose to forget it.
Image: Fludd, Robert. Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet Et Minoris […] Historia, Tomus II (1619), Tractatus I, Sectio I, Liber X, De Triplici Animae in Corpore Visione.1619. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia, 12 Apr. 2006. Web. 31 Oct. 2012.
It's a fascinating read, but that's got to be the most misleading title for an article ever.
(Fludd)
It should read, "humans choose to remember written facts more if we know they will be erased later," or "we change which information we store in our brains if we have access to external storage." But that's not very sexy, or scary.
The studies show nothing at all about the Internet.
They don't even reflect badly on computers, since they did not vary participants' exposure to either the Internet or computers themselves. You'd likely see the same effects if you took computers completely out of the studies -- if you asked participants to write things down in a notebook, and told some of them the notebook would be burned later (this is borne out anecdotally by the story of the husband and wife at the end; each of whom selectively chose not to store information they expected the other spouse would have remembered for them). The only way to actually measure the effects of the Internet is to compare two groups, one which uses computers, and one which uses an older technology -- paper notebooks, parchment, or fingerpaint -- to try to record information.
This article is either an example of sloppy experiment design, or just incredibly glib and shoddy reporting -- or editing -- which caters to people's fears that "the Internet makes us dumber."
That's an easy sell, because the idea that a new technology will make us dumber and erode our memory is not a new fear: Socrates argued that if people learned how to read and write, it would "introduce forgetfulness into the soul of those who learn it: they will not practice using their memory because they will put their trust in writing, which is external" (as recorded by Plato, in Phaedrus).
Sound familiar? The truth is, Socrates was probably right -- we surely depend less upon our memories than the ancients did -- think of the griots of West Africa, or the Homeric storytellers who memorized days' worth of stories. But does this mean we're actually less intelligent for it? Very few of us would argue that basic literacy has made humans dumber. And how would this apply to the Internet, which simply supplies us access to more and more writing?
The Internet may in fact be making us dumber, but this group of studies doesn't show it; rhetoric like this sort of tongue-in-cheek fear mongering just muddies the water. If anything, these studies show the remarkable ability of the human brain to conserve resources and 'outsource' brute memory tasks to external tools.
Another possibility is that the Internet is making journalists dumber, but I doubt it -- we just have access to a greater volume of reporting, both good and bad. Maybe it's good that we know that this article will be online forever -- we can choose to forget it.
Image: Fludd, Robert. Utriusque Cosmi Maioris Scilicet Et Minoris […] Historia, Tomus II (1619), Tractatus I, Sectio I, Liber X, De Triplici Animae in Corpore Visione.1619. Wikimedia Commons. Wikimedia, 12 Apr. 2006. Web. 31 Oct. 2012.
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