Last week, I asked you to pon­der what our mem­o­ries might become now that Google puts vast heaps of infor­ma­tion just one click away. And pon­der you did:

I have to ask, WHY do you state, “This throws a mas­sive tech­no­log­i­cal wrench into the machin­ery of our own mem­o­ries”, infer­ring some­thing neg­a­tive??? Might this be a totally LIBERATING sit­u­a­tion? – Rick Short, Indium Corporation

Per­haps, much like using dic­tio­nar­ies in grade school helped us to learn and remem­ber new infor­ma­tion, Google is doing the same? Each time we “google” and learn some­thing new aren’t we actu­ally adding to our knowl­edge base in some way? – Lester Bryant III

Finally, I ran across this. Our old friend Daniel Weg­ner (trans­ac­tive mem­ory) and col­leagues Betsy Spar­row and Jenny Liu from Colum­bia Uni­ver­sity actu­ally did research on this very topic this past year. It appears from the study that are brains are already adapt­ing to hav­ing Inter­net search as a mem­ory crutch. Par­tic­i­pants were less likely to remem­ber infor­ma­tion they looked up online when they knew they could access it again at any time. Also, if they looked up infor­ma­tion that they knew they could remem­ber, they were less likely to remem­ber where they found it. But if the infor­ma­tion was deter­mined to be dif­fi­cult to remem­ber, the par­tic­i­pants were more likely to remem­ber where they found it, so they could nav­i­gate there again.

The beau­ti­ful thing about our capac­ity to remem­ber things is that it’s highly elas­tic. It’s not restricted to one type of infor­ma­tion. It will nat­u­rally adapt to new chal­lenges and require­ments. As many rightly com­mented on last week’s col­umn, the advent of Google may intro­duce an entirely new appli­ca­tion of mem­ory – one that unleashes our capa­bil­i­ties rather than restricts them. Let me give you an example.

If I had writ­ten last week’s col­umn in 1987, before the age of Inter­net Search, I would have been very hes­i­tant to use the ref­er­ences I did: the Trans­ac­tive Mem­ory Hypoth­e­sis of Daniel Weg­ner and the scene from Annie Hall. The rea­son was that I just could remem­ber them that well. I knew (or thought I knew) what the gen­eral gist was, but I had to search them out to reac­quaint myself with the spe­cific details of each. I used Google in both cases, but I already was pretty sure that Wikipedia would have a good overview of trans­ac­tive mem­ory and that Youtube would have the clip in ques­tion. Sure enough, both those des­ti­na­tions topped the results that Google brought back. So, my search for trans­ac­tive mem­ory uti­lized my own trans­ac­tive mem­o­riza­tions. The same was true, by the way, for my ref­er­ence to Van­nevar Bush at the open­ing of this column.

By know­ing what type of infor­ma­tion I was likely to find, and where I was likely to find it, I could check the ref­er­ences to ensure they were rel­e­vant and sum­ma­rize what I quickly researched in order to make my point. All I had to do was remem­ber high-level sum­ma­tions of con­cepts, rather than the level of detail required to use them in a mean­ing­ful manner.

One of my favorite con­cepts is the idea of con­silience – lit­er­ally the “jump­ing together” of knowl­edge. I believe one of the great­est gifts of the dig­i­ti­za­tion of infor­ma­tion is the dri­ving of con­silience. We can now “graze” across mul­ti­ple dis­ci­plines with­out hav­ing to dive too deep in any one and pull together some­thing use­ful, and occa­sion­ally amaz­ing. Deep dives are now pos­si­ble “on demand.” Might our mem­o­ries adapt to become con­silience orches­tra­tors, able to quickly sift through the sum of our expe­ri­ence and gather together rel­e­vant scraps of mem­ory to form the frame­work of new thoughts and approaches?

I hope so, because I per­son­ally find the poten­tial of that quite amazing.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider Jan­u­ary 12, 2012


Biography / Resume : Gord Hotchkiss is the founder and senior vice president of Enquiro, now part of Mediative. He is renowned in the industry for his expertise when it comes to understanding online user and search behaviour. He and the Enquiro team have built a solid reputation for being the leading experts when it comes to understanding what happens on a search portal and why. Before Enquiro, Gord was chairman and director of SEMPO (The Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization), he worked as a columnist for MediaPost and Search Engine Land, and he was a regular speaker at industry conferences and events. Gord is also the author of The BuyerSphere Project: How Business Buys from Business in a digital marketplace.