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My students have become cyborgs. They are constantly wired in and uncomfortable if they don’t have continuous access to the internet. As they leave class, the smart phones glow immediately. For the cyborg generation, part of their memories and their minds reside online.
But I’m not writing a complaint. I am writing to praise the cyborg generation.
People have always stored some of their memories in external places, frequently in other individuals’ brains. For example, I keep some of my memories in my wife’s head—the recollections are safer there. In families, teams, and work groups, we share memory responsibilities. We don’t have to remember every single thing, if we can simply remember who does know certain types of information. We also serve as memory repositories for others—becoming the expert on certain topics and events. Daniel Wegner and his colleagues describe this as transactive memory. In effective groups, people share memory responsibilities.
I also store a lot of my memories and knowledge in things—books, notes, and pictures. My office is inundated with paper. Photocopies of articles, drafts of manuscripts, and outputs of data analyses are piled on every flat surface and squirreled away in file cabinets. I have books and journals mostly organized on over 100 feet of shelving. At home we have pictures in photo albums and hidden away in closets. I don’t have to remember all of this information—every journal article and book I’ve read, every data analysis I’ve computed, every manuscript I’ve written, or every family vacation we’ve taken. Instead I simply know that I have seen something before and hope that I filed it in the correct place. The risk of my reliance on external memory is my regular failure to put things away correctly. For years, my memory has been spread throughout the shelves and file cabinets of my office. Of course, I’m not unusual. With the advent of writing, people transitioned from oral traditions to written records. History was no longer shared in stories and songs, but was preserved in books.
Enter the internet. Now my memory is dispersed in the data cloud. If I know that a piece of information exists, then a Google search should reveal it. Of course sometimes searching the internet can be as frustrating as searching the memories in my brain. I can know that I know some fact or someone’s name, but be unable to retrieve the information (a tip of the tongue effect or brain freeze). Similarly, my internet searches sometimes fail. I know the information must exist, but I can’t find it (A tip of the cloud? An internet search freeze? What shall we call it?).
In a recent research report, Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner (2011) described how college students have become dependent on computers and the internet as their memories. When Sparrow and colleagues gave the students memorable trivia, they also told the students whether or not the information would be stored on the computer. Sometimes the students were told that the trivia fact would be erased immediately. Other times, the students were told that a fact would be stored in the computer and told where it would be stored. The students remembered the trivia better when they believed it would be erased. If they thought the computer was storing the information, they put less effort into remembering the fact. The students did, however, frequently remember where in the computer the information was to be stored. Sparrow, Liu, and Wegner argued that these students, the cyborg generation, use computers as external memories much like people have always used family members. You don’t have to remember something if you know who does remember the information. Why remember some fact if you know Google remembers for you?
My memory has always been bigger than my brain. My knowledge is stored on the shelves of my office and the drawers of my file cabinets. My memories are stored in the minds of my friends and family.
For the cyborg generation, their memories are stored on the internet and in the cloud. Their knowledge is a Google search away. Their personal experiences are recorded forever in Facebook photos and status updates.
I praise the cyborg generation because they have a distinct advantage over the written record generation—they will be faster retrieving information. Searching my office can be a nightmare. Trying to find a set of photos in our house is time consuming. Searching the internet is becoming easier, simpler, and faster. Memories are a mouse click and a smart phone search away. The cyborgs will soon replace the old humans.
