Memories still matter in today’s digital age
Expert on how mobile phones have changed how we remember things
As Anne Of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery once pointed out: “Nothing is ever really lost to us as long as we remember it.”
And, from cave drawings and treasured books to fading photographs and old ticket stubs, we have always used physical reminders to remember.
But according to experts, the age of digital technology is transforming our memories. Professor Andrew Hoskins, of Glasgow University, explores how reliance on smartphones, search engines and social media is affecting our memories.
The social sciences professor and founding editor-inchief of the Sage Journal of Memory Studies says there has been a key shift in both the way we process, and our attitudes to, memory – moving away from the act of remembering, to the act of knowing where to look online for quick answers.
“We have evolved from a reliance on digital media memory to a total dependence on it,” he said.
“Essentially, we no longer need to remember. Anything we need to find, we can simply look up through our phones, tablets and computers in a matter of seconds.
“The brain is a muscle, and if we’re no longer needing to use certain parts of that muscle, it will naturally weaken.” Professor Hoskins’ new book, Digital Memory Studies, suggests social media and the need to record our lives has changed how we experience those lives.
Many of us are, he believes, seeing life through how it can later be shared on social media, rather than living in the moment. “We record what we want people to see and so we are remembering it through how it has been filtered and portrayed on social media, rather than how it actually happened,” he said.
“It seems that experiences are no longer ‘real’ unless they are Tweeted, Instagrammed, or Youtubed.
“In some ways you could say that the act of recording has become more urgent than seeing that which is being recorded.
“Just to hint at the scale of the difference in a generation, there are more photographs taken, copied, and shared of my son, in the first month of his life, than there were of me in the first 10 years of mine.”
It is estimated that people have taken more than three billion digital photos since 2012, and that around 300 million pictures are uploaded to Facebook every day. An experiment in New Zealand backs up Professor Hoskins’ claim that the act of recording and photographing through digital means is having a direct impact on how well we remember situations. In the experiment, a number of participants were taken round a museum and asked to memorise what they were shown.
Participants were directed to observe some objects and to photograph others. The results showed that if an object was photographed, the participant remembered far fewer details about it than if they had simply looked at it. “Despite the decay and wear and tear of photographs, letters and other objects that are reminders of people and past experiences, keeping them is like holding on to those people and experiences,” says Professor Hoskins.
But as we evolve ever further into the digital age, memory experts are urging us to become more aware of the effects on our memories through too much dependence on digital media.
“Ultimately, digital existence weakens what was once an active memory, a human memory that had to work hard to sustain a continuity of past – of identity, of place, of relationships,” says Professor Hoskins. “Individual human memory is much more fragile than we like to think.
“And without it, precious moments, knowledge and experiences could be lost forever.”