Is Google Messing with Human Memory?

Recommended posting for those who think about media hype about Google and the Web:

The ‘Google Effect’ Debunked: Human Memory Changes Did Not Start with Search Engines
via Search Engine Journal by Gez Hebburn on 25/07/11

Snip:
“A research team led by psychologist Betsy Sparrow at Colombia University has identified a ‘new’ form of amnesia, and dubbed it the Google effect.

They are claiming – and being echoed by millions of copycat blog posts and news releases desperate for trending content – that internet search has changed the way we think.

It appears that all Betsy’s expensive team has done is tapped into a few current memes, picked a combination of phrases that would do well in the press and online, designed a hypothesis that would deliver exactly that, and then dressed it all up as original scientific research.

The Google Effect is as Old as Words

Forget search engines, the so-called ‘Google effect’ started thousands of years ago with the first appearance of writing. Before the development of written languages, people remembered everything of any importance, and passed it on. Stories, facts, history, legends and all manner of common knowledge had to be memorised and communicated verbally to others.

Crucial information like which berries killed you, how to chat up a cave-girl from the next village, how to light a fire, and which mushrooms were best for parties were effectively passed on verbally as part of the collective folk memory.

Humanity’s dependence on memory has declined constantly since those times, in line with the invention and spread of other record-keeping and information retrieval methods such as writing – that old-fashioned pre-requisite of the internet, and the root cause of any human memory changes that are ascribed to technology.

Literacy is the Main Factor in Memory Evolution”

I’ve posted in the past some of the writing about how the printing press was detroying human memory too. It seems that OMGism has been with us for quite some time.

So there you go, next hyperbolic headline please:

Libraries are storing information, culture and knowledge! They’re messing with human memory!

OMG, we may have to depend on our memories. 😉

Stephen