Speaking of the perils of social media, here’s something else we might be able to blame it for.
How social media is hurting your memory
Each day, hundreds of millions of people document and share their experiences on social media, from packed parties to the most intimate family moments. Social platforms let us stay in touch with friends and forge new relationships like never before, but those increases in communication and social connection may come at a cost. In a new paper published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers showed that those who documented and shared their experiences on social media formed less precise memories of those events.
I’m very suspicious of that, though. This xkcd post puts the reasons why better than I can.
The piece concludes by almost contradicting itself.
The researchers concluded that the likely culprit of the memory deficit was not purely social media, because even taking photos or writing experiential notes without publishing them showed the same effects. Just interrupting the experience didn’t seem to hurt, because those who were instructed to reflect on a TED talk internally without writing retained as much information as those who watched it normally. Instead, it was the act of externalizing their experience — that is, reproducing it in any form — that seemed to make them lose something of the original experience.
I suppose leading with that conclusion might have made for a less attention-grabbing headline?
But perhaps our devices more generally might be good for our memory.
Old memories, accidentally trapped in amber by our digital devices
Designer and typographer Marcin Wichary started a thread on Twitter yesterday about “UIs that accidentally amass memories” with the initial example of the “Preferred Networks” listing of all the wifi networks his computer had ever joined, “unexpected reminders of business trips, vacations, accidental detours, once frequented and now closed cafés”.Several other people chimed in with their own examples…the Bluetooth pairings list, the Reminders app, the list of alarms, saved places in mapping apps, AIM/iChat status message log, chat apps not used for years, the Gmail drafts folder, etc.
Reading about those examples makes me (almost) regret being such a tidy person who regularly deletes, wipes and reinstalls everything…
Miscellaneous Details 