Monday, July 18, 2011

"Poor memory? Blame Google"

Memory and media in the news: this story from The Guardian associates technological mediation with the erosion of memory:
First it was a search engine. Then it became almost synonymous with the internet. Now Google is a replacement for the ancient human faculty of memory.
Research by scientists at Columbia University has found that people are adapting their ability to remember because of the formidable power of search engines such as Google to remember things for them. In short, people no longer always need to know stuff; they just need to know where it can be found.
As we'll be discussing in class, this idea is not completely new. In fact, it goes all the way back to Plato...

Sunday, July 17, 2011

Welcome to Memory and Media (Semester Two, 2011)

Hi everyone:

Welcome to FTVMS 219/326. This blog will serve as a portal for any interesting links, videos or other resources that come to hand during the semester. You should feel free to add your own thoughts and links using the 'comments' function, and let me know if there are any bigger ideas you'd like to share in the form of a guest post.