Feb 28, 2016 07:38 PM
http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/edu...head-cloud
EXCERPT: I do not remember [...] There are so many things I no longer know, simple things that matter to me in practical and personal ways, yet I usually get by just fine. Apart from the few occasions when my phone has run out of battery at a crucial moment [...] it hasn’t seemed to matter that I have downloaded most of my working memory on to electronic devices. It feels a small inconvenience, given that I can access information equivalent to tens of billions of books on a gadget that fits into my back pocket.
For thousands of years, human beings have relied on stone tablets, scrolls, books or Post-it notes to remember things that their minds cannot retain, but there is something profoundly different about the way we remember and forget in the internet age.
[...] My phone is a museum of quick-fire text exchanges. With a few clicks, I can retrieve, in mind-numbing detail, information about my previous movements, thoughts and feelings. So could someone else. Even my most private digital memories are not mine alone. They have become data to be restructured, repackaged, aggregated, copied, deleted, monetised or sold by internet firms. Our digital memories extend far beyond our reach.
In the late 1990s the philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “the extended mind” to describe how when we use pen and paper, calculators, or laptops to help us think or remember, these external objects are incorporated into our cognitive processes. “The technology we use becomes part of our minds, extending our minds and indeed our selves into the world,” Chalmers said in a 2011 Ted talk. [...] The more we extend our minds online, the harder it is becoming to keep control of our digital pasts, or to tell where our memories begin or end. And, while society’s collective memory is expanding at an astonishing rate, our internal, individual ones are shrinking.
[...] Our brains are lazy; we are reluctant to remember things when we can in effect delegate the task to someone or something else. [...] when we know that a computer can remember something for us we are less likely to remember it ourselves. [...] 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. A Harvard University project in 2013 found that when people were allowed to use Google to check their answers to trivia questions they rated their own intelligence and memories more highly – even if they were given artificially low test results. Students usually believed more often that Google was confirming a fact they already knew, rather than providing them with new information.
This changed when Adrian Ward, now an assistant professor at the University of Austin, who designed the study as part of his PhD research, mimicked a slow internet connection so that students were forced to wait 25 seconds to read the answer to a Google query. The delay, he noted, stripped them of the “feeling of knowing” because they became more aware that they were consulting an external source. In the internet age, Ward writes, people “may offload more and more information while losing sight of the distinction between information stored in their minds and information stored online”.
By blurring the distinction between our personal and our digital memories, modern technology could encourage intellectual complacency, making people less curious about new information because they feel they already know it, and less likely to pay attention to detail because our computers are remembering it....
EXCERPT: I do not remember [...] There are so many things I no longer know, simple things that matter to me in practical and personal ways, yet I usually get by just fine. Apart from the few occasions when my phone has run out of battery at a crucial moment [...] it hasn’t seemed to matter that I have downloaded most of my working memory on to electronic devices. It feels a small inconvenience, given that I can access information equivalent to tens of billions of books on a gadget that fits into my back pocket.
For thousands of years, human beings have relied on stone tablets, scrolls, books or Post-it notes to remember things that their minds cannot retain, but there is something profoundly different about the way we remember and forget in the internet age.
[...] My phone is a museum of quick-fire text exchanges. With a few clicks, I can retrieve, in mind-numbing detail, information about my previous movements, thoughts and feelings. So could someone else. Even my most private digital memories are not mine alone. They have become data to be restructured, repackaged, aggregated, copied, deleted, monetised or sold by internet firms. Our digital memories extend far beyond our reach.
In the late 1990s the philosopher David Chalmers coined the term “the extended mind” to describe how when we use pen and paper, calculators, or laptops to help us think or remember, these external objects are incorporated into our cognitive processes. “The technology we use becomes part of our minds, extending our minds and indeed our selves into the world,” Chalmers said in a 2011 Ted talk. [...] The more we extend our minds online, the harder it is becoming to keep control of our digital pasts, or to tell where our memories begin or end. And, while society’s collective memory is expanding at an astonishing rate, our internal, individual ones are shrinking.
[...] Our brains are lazy; we are reluctant to remember things when we can in effect delegate the task to someone or something else. [...] when we know that a computer can remember something for us we are less likely to remember it ourselves. [...] 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. A Harvard University project in 2013 found that when people were allowed to use Google to check their answers to trivia questions they rated their own intelligence and memories more highly – even if they were given artificially low test results. Students usually believed more often that Google was confirming a fact they already knew, rather than providing them with new information.
This changed when Adrian Ward, now an assistant professor at the University of Austin, who designed the study as part of his PhD research, mimicked a slow internet connection so that students were forced to wait 25 seconds to read the answer to a Google query. The delay, he noted, stripped them of the “feeling of knowing” because they became more aware that they were consulting an external source. In the internet age, Ward writes, people “may offload more and more information while losing sight of the distinction between information stored in their minds and information stored online”.
By blurring the distinction between our personal and our digital memories, modern technology could encourage intellectual complacency, making people less curious about new information because they feel they already know it, and less likely to pay attention to detail because our computers are remembering it....