The journal Science (via the BBC) considers research that our memories are no longer so full of answers, but instead fuller of where those answers are kept – on-line.
Is this a good thing do you think ? Do we need to retain all this information when instead we can just use the internet as “transactive memory” …
transactive memory
“An idea that there are external memory sources – really storage places that exist in other people”
“I really think the internet has become a form of this transactive memory, and I wanted to test it”
(Dr Betsy Sparrow of Columbia University – lead research author)
So … the internet isn’t making us stupid … it is just changing us into a walking indexing service !
