Donald Clark Plan B: Are we outsourcing our memory? - The Diigo Meta page

• 24 Jan 08
  

  Dennis Richards

  humor memory web2.0 digitaldisorder

• 20 Dec 07
  

  Michel Roland

  digital_identity literacy memory

  • When neuroscientist Ian Robertson tested 3,000 people he found significant differences between the young and old in the recall of personal information (telephone numbers, relative’s dates of birth etc). The differences were in some cases as much as 87% versus 40% recall. Robertson puts this down to fingertip knowledge retrieval. Why remember telephone numbers, dates and email addresses, when they’re stored online?
  • What’s remarkable about all of this outsourced memory is that’s it’s free. The tools, storage and retrieval are all free. It’s hard to see how astonishing this change has been, how absolutely revolutionary. And this is only the beginning. Our new digital identities will become ever-more important, possibly as important as our biological identities.

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