Digital Amnesia – How the Internet is Killing Our Memory

 
I was once in a situation where I was out in the city, my phone battery had died and I somehow had to contact a friend to let them know where I was.
Now I know what you’re thinking, ‘Terri why didn’t you just find a payphone and call them from there?’
Aha… smart thinking that! Only I don’t store phone numbers in my head anymore, that’s what my phone is for. Or at least that’s what I’ve been subconsciously telling myself for the past 10 or so years since I’ve had a mobile phone.
The truth is – I couldn’t tell you any mobile or home telephone number of any close family member or friend. Not one. I could tell you my Grandparent’s old telephone number and my best friend’s number from when she was six like I was reading you my birth date… but beyond that I’m lost. And apparently I’m not the only one.
A 2015 study by cyber-security company, Kaspersky Lab, entitled “The rise and impact of digital amnesia: Why we need to protect what we no longer remember,” ultimately found that many of us struggle to recall memories that we store in digital devices. The evidence was found across all age groups and equally among both men and women.
The study, conducted by research firm Opinion Matters and commissioned by Kaspersky Lab, surveyed 6,000 consumers aged between 16 and 55+, split equally between male and female, with 1,000 from each of the UK, France, Germany, Italy, Spain and Benelux.
It found that across Europe, more than half of adult consumers (up to 60 percent) could phone the house they lived in at aged 10, but not their children (53 percent) or the office (51 percent) without first looking up the number.
How many of you are nodding along? And how many of you are wondering what ‘digital amnesia’ is?
Kaspersky Lab defines it as “the experience of forgetting information that you trust a digital device to store and remember for you”.
The study further found that a quarter (or 24 percent) of participants would forget an online fact as soon as they had used it.
We may be living in the age of information, but if we can’t remember something right after we’ve read it, then what use is it?
Although we have knowledge at our fingertips, this study suggests that we’re not actually doing anything with it, and worse, we’re letting our memories down because we’re not actively asking it to remember anything.
On a more positive note though, it did find that two thirds (67 percent) of participants say they would ‘sometimes’ make a note of something they had found online. However, it also found one in three European consumers is happy to forget, or risk forgetting information they can easily find – or find again – online.
Similarly, a paper published in Science in 2011 by Harvard and the Universities of Columbia and Wisconsin, which looked at memory and Internet use, found that the way young people in the US remembered information was changing due to readily available information online.
The study termed the fact that participants retained fewer facts, but could readily recall where the information was stored, ‘the Google effect’.
I don’t think these findings are surprising. Anybody with a mobile phone or access to the Internet has been there. Apparently 61 percent of participants say they need answers quickly and simply don’t have the time for libraries or books, an explanation which accurately reflects our impatience in a fast moving world; but at what cost?
The study (obviously) focuses more on the implications of a lack of IT security, given how much personal data and information is stored on digital devices, rather than the impact on human memory itself.
It does however, suggest that “we need to better understand the direction and long-term implications of this trend in order to protect the information we no longer store in our minds”.
Is switching off the answer? Perhaps not, but it will be interesting to find out what other studies come up with to determine the long-term impact the digital world has/will have on us in the future.
Let’s just hope we remember this conversation in the first place.
By Terri Cluckie