The internet is not an incremental step in the progression of written culture…
“The Brain Center at Whipple’s”, The Twilight Zone, CBS, 1964
From The New Statesman:
Our brains are lazy; we are reluctant to remember things when we can in effect delegate the task to someone or something else. You can observe this by listening to couples, who often consult one another’s memories: “What was the name of that nice Chinese restaurant we went to the other day?” Subconsciously, partners distribute responsibility for remembering information according to each other’s strengths. I ask my husband for directions, he consults me on people’s names.
In one study conducted in 1991, psychologists assigned a series of memory exercises to pairs of students, some of whom had been dating for at least three months and some of whom did not know one another. The dating couples remembered more than the non-dating pairs. They also remembered more unique information; when a fact fell into their partner’s area of expertise, they were more likely to forget it.
In a similar way, when we know that a computer can remember something for us we are less likely to remember it ourselves. For a study published by the journal Science in 1991, people were asked to type some trivia facts into a computer. Those who believed the facts would be saved at the end of the experiment remembered less than those who thought they would be deleted – even when they were explicitly asked to memorise them. In an era when technology is doing ever more remembering, it is unsurprising that we are more inclined to forget.
It is sometimes suggested that in time the worry that the internet is making us forgetful will sound as silly as early fears that books would do the same. But the internet is not an incremental step in the progression of written culture, it is revolutionising the way we consume information. When you pull an encyclopaedia down from a library shelf, it is obvious that you are retrieving a fact you have forgotten, or never knew. Google is so fast and easy to use that we can forget we have consulted it at all: we are at risk of confusing the internet’s memory with our own.
