Remembrance of Things Lost: As we increasingly outsource our memories to devices, we may be forgetting the pleasures of imperfect recall.
One reason that I’ve never kept a journal is that the attention that goes into keeping one is, I feel, more profitably spent on engaging with the moment. I’d rather live in the instant than ‘gram the instant. Support for my instinct came the other day when I read about a study conducted at University College London on the alleged contribution of technology to early dementia. The research suggested that regions of the brain crucial to forming memories — in this case of the features and locations of landmarks in physical space — may tend to wither prematurely with the use of automated navigation aids. The part of the hippocampus that remembers things simply doesn’t turn on when a device performs the task instead.
Facebook's new nostalgia feature is already bringing up painful memories: Personal history, memory, nostalgia: this is impossibly nuanced and complex terrain for an algorithm to be galumphing around in. Given the number of misfires with the Year and Review, and the experience Forbes and his friend have already had with On This Day, it seems inevitable that dredging up an old post each day for every Facebook user is going to cause some pain. Given the power of nostalgia, it seems inevitable that Facebook will keep trying to get it right.
Searching Online May Make You Think You're Smarter Than You Are: The more we rely on the Internet, Fisher says, the harder it will be to draw a line between where our knowledge ends and the web begins. And unlike poring through books or debating peers, asking the Internet is unique because it's so effortless. "We are not forced to face our own ignorance and ask for help; we can just look up the answer immediately," Fisher writes in an email. "We think these features make it more likely for people to consider knowledge stored online as their own." [o estudo referido é este "Searching for Explanations: How the Internet Inflates Estimates of Internal Knowledge"]
