Apparently Google is now ‘a replacement for the ancient human faculty of memory,’ according to an article I have just spied in the Guardian. I love this kind of speculation that technology changes the shape and connections in the human brain. Although I am not totally sure that I can believe the articles thesis that Google is teaching us to remember information in new ways.
For example; I have kept a huge filing cabinet of info on interesting exhibitions and articles that I have enjoyed for the past five years or so. I take great pleasure in the alphabetical filing system I have created for cataloguing the info, it allows me to indulge my inner secretary! I am not sure why this process is any different to something like online bookmarking or search engines, both things seem like similar approaches to information retrieval. One is an old system and one is new and dependent on a technological engine.
Principal researcher Betsey Sparrow (beautiful name) says that internet has become “an external memory source that we can access at any time.” The article says that this makes the internet an “arena where information is stored collectively outside ourselves.” It does then move on to say that this is very similar to the “collective memory” that we rely upon among our family, colleagues and friends. So in essence if we are already primed to remember information that is outside of ourselves, why does the technological or mediated extension of this process amount to – so the article seems to suggest- a fundamental change in how our brain works?
