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...

2 comments:

  1. I think Plato said something along the lines of 'The more young people don't have to remember information by themselves, they'll end up intellectually lazy'. Or was it something else?

    It's actually pretty interesting, because it shows that not much really has changed in how people see the younger generation 2000 years later. It's quite easy to blame the convenience of modern technology for the exact same thing. If people start relying too much on digital devices to remember information, they might end up not seeing any reason to memorize important things.

    But people have had moral panics over this stuff for ages, and it's really easy to overreact over these things.

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  2. A bit unrelated to the article above, but nontheless very interesting for our class:

    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?ref=opinion

    Excerpt: "We generate over 1.8 zettabytes of digital information a year. By some estimates, that’s nearly 30 million times the amount of information contained in all the books ever published. Even if we had perfectly stable storage, could we ever have enough to preserve everything?

    The short answer is no — but only because we’re trying to replicate the practices used for decades to maintain paper archives. In this model, preservation begins only after a record is past its use. With data, intervention needs to happen earlier, ideally at an object’s creation. And tough decisions need to be made, early on, regarding what needs to be saved. We must replace digital preservation with digital curation."

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