"Just Google It!" The Effects of Digital Amnesia
By Kendra Javens
We live in a world full of technology and information at our fingertips. This brings the question of why memorize anything at all when we can just Google it? Technology has advanced in many ways leading to a change in our memory functioning. We all know that there is information that we have learned but have forgotten even just after learning it because we know that we can just look it up on the internet when we need to remember the information. It’s as though we are using the internet and its vast source of information as a crutch. This extends beyond just facts learned in a classroom or at work; if I were to ask you what your significant other's phone number was would you be able to recite it without pulling it up on your phone? My guess is that the majority of you would not be able to. In fact, this research has been done by the Kaspersky Lab and they found that only 49% of participants could recall the phone number of their spouse. In the same article, the lab recounts that a high majority of people would feel great stress if they were to lose their phone and the contents on it.
As a college student, I know I would be devastated to completely lose everything on my phone or laptop. They are vital in my everyday life. They store an abundance of information and photographs that I value. Because of this, some may say that this is a good thing that we have so much information at our fingertips because it allows us to better use the memory space that we have available for important information that we cannot just look up. I would not completely disagree with this, but that begs the question: Are we truly using the space that we have to store memory or are we just using the internet as a memory crutch? Sparrow and Wegner (2011) conducted a few different studies to gain a better understanding of how digital amnesia truly affects one's memory abilities. Throughout their studies they found that overall if the participants were told that they could later look back on the information they performed worse in memory recalled, compared to the participants that were told the information would not be accessible later on. This compares to our lives because we know the information can be readily called upon, so we don't bother learning it. Before the internet was established any information, you learned you would have to remember or spend hours trying to find it in a book (if you even had the correct book accessible).
Okay, but why should we care? Well according to Maria Wimber (University of Birmingham), she says that this habit can prevent one from creating long term memories. Now to form a long-term memory, one must recall information multiple times from their short-term memory to create a lasting effect. That being said what Wimber says makes sense. This tactic the brain uses to clear space for new important knowledge. This is also why we do not remember things from earlier in our lives as well as we do closer to the age that we are. It's kind of like in the movie Inside Out, when Bing Bong "dies.” When in reality Riley (the main character) is losing that memory to make space for new ones. So, if we want long lasting memories, we need to stop Googling everything. Try to truly think of the answer before just looking it up.
References
Sparrow, B., Liu, J., & Wegner, D. M. (2011). Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, 333(6043), 476-478. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezproxy.mnsu.edu/10.1126/science.1207745
https://usa.kaspersky.com/blog/digital-amnesia-survival/5548/
https://www.bbc.com/news/education-34454264
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RPQRHemfk9E