Is Google Replacing Memory?

by Admin


09 Jan
 None    Internet Related


by Gord Hotchkiss


by Gord Hotchkiss

How old is Tony Ben­nett anyway?”

We were sit­ting in a condo on a ski hill with friends, count­ing down to the New Year, when the age­less Mr. Ben­nett appeared on TV. One of us won­dered aloud about just how many new years he has per­son­ally ush­ered in.

In days gone by, the ques­tion would have just hung there. We would all offer our guesses but there would be no defin­i­tive res­o­lu­tion of the ques­tion. It would prob­a­bly fill up a few min­utes of con­ver­sa­tion. If some­one felt strongly about the topic, it might even start an argu­ment. But, at the end of it all, there would be no defin­i­tive answer. There would only be opinions.

This was the way of the world. We were restricted to the knowl­edge we could each jam in our nog­gin. And if our opin­ion con­flicted with another’s, all we could do is argue. In Annie Hall, Woody Allen set up the sce­nario per­fectly. He and Diane Keaton are in a movie line. Behind them, an intel­lec­tual blowhard is in mid-stream pon­tif­i­ca­tion on every­thing from movie mak­ing of Fellini to the media the­o­ries of Mar­shall McLuhan. Finally, Allen can take it no more and asks the cam­era “What do you do with a guy like this?” The “guy” takes excep­tion and explains to Allen that he teaches a course on McLuhan at Colum­bia. But Allen has the last laugh – lit­er­ally. He pulls the real Mar­shall McLuhan out from behind a in-lobby dis­play and McLuhan pro­ceeds to intel­lec­tu­ally evis­cer­ate the Colum­bia professor.

“If only,” Allen sighs to the cam­era, “Life was actu­ally like this.”

Well, now, some 35 years later, it may be. While we may not have Mar­shall McLuhan in our back pocket, we do have Google. And for many ques­tions, Google is the final arbi­tra­tor. Opin­ions quickly give way to facts (or, at least, infor­ma­tion pre­sented as fact online.) No longer do we have to won­der how old Tony Ben­nett really is. Now, we can quickly check the answer.

If you stop to think about this, it has mas­sive implications.

In 1985, Daniel Weg­ner pro­posed some­thing along these lines when he intro­duced the hypo­thet­i­cal con­cept of trans­ac­tive mem­ory. An exten­sion of “group mind,” trans­ac­tive mem­ory posits a type of meta-memory, where our own capac­ity to remem­ber things is enhanced in a group by know­ing whom in that group knows more than we do about any given topic.

In it’s sim­plest form, trans­ac­tive mem­ory is my know­ing that my wife tends to remem­ber birth­days and anniver­saries but I remem­ber when to pay our util­ity bills. It’s not that I can’t remem­ber birth­days and my wife can’t remem­ber to pay bills, it’s just that we don’t have to go to the extra effort if we know our part­ner has it covered.

If Wegner’s hypoth­e­sis is cor­rect (and it cer­tainly passes my own smell test) then trans­ac­tive mem­ory has been around for a long time. In fact, many believe that the acqui­si­tion of lan­guage, which allowed for the devel­op­ment of trans­ac­tive mem­ory and other aids to sur­vival in our ances­tral tribes, was prob­a­bly respon­si­ble for the “Great Leap For­ward” in our own evolution.

But with ubiq­ui­tous access to online knowl­edge, trans­ac­tive mem­ory takes on a whole new spin. Now, not only don’t we have to remem­ber as much as we used to, we don’t even have to remem­ber who else might have the answer. For much of what we need to know, it’s as sim­ple as search­ing for it on our smart­phone.  Our search engine of choice does the heavy lift­ing for us. This throws a mas­sive tech­no­log­i­cal wrench into the machin­ery of our own mem­o­ries. Much of what it was orig­i­nally intended for may no longer be required.  And this begs the ques­tion, “If we no longer have to remem­ber stuff we can just look up online, what will we use our mem­ory for?”

Some­thing to pon­der at the begin­ning of a new year.

Oh..and in case you’re won­der­ing, Anthony Dominick Benedetto was born August 3, 1926, mak­ing him 85.

Orig­i­nally pub­lished in Mediapost’s Search Insider Jan­u­ary 5, 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.



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