Digital amnesia

People are using smartphones and the internet as an extension of their memory which may lead to 'digital amnesia', a new survey suggests. In a survey of 6,000 people aged 16 or older in six European countries including the UK, researchers found that people increasingly rely on their devices and are unable to recall important information about their loved ones.

In the survey, seven in ten could not remember their children's phone numbers and nearly nine in ten could not not remember their children's phone numbers and nearly nine in ten could not recall the numbers for their children's schools. With information easily accessible by the swipe of a finger, reliance on digital devices becomes quite natural.

In our increasingly hyper-connected world, people simply have too many phone numbers, addresses, tasks and events in their calendar, account names, passwords, PIN codes and so on. We couldn’t remember everything even if we wanted to, but can access the information on demand when we need it via a connected device, according to Kaspersky Lab.

As many researchers say, when we store information externally (e.g. in a phone), we thereby encourage our mind to erase it. Scientists say that forgetting is not a bad thing at all: our brains have a capacity limit in terms of how much information is accessible. If we do not recall old memories, information gradually fades until we forget it.

Jon Mason of Charles Darwin University says, “A search on the term 'digital amnesia' reveals a range of interpretations - from simply being forgetful about where some specific content is located; to the consequences of continual technological innovation that renders old formats obsolete & sometimes unreadable; to the syndrome that follows the relentless re-invention & re-branding of organisations such as government agencies that results in broken URLs.

A case in point is the short, but significant, 14-year history of Education Network Australia (edna). Not so many years ago it represented the most prominent collaborative response by the Australian education & training sector to the opportunities of the digital revolution (1997-2011). It's all but vanished, apart from the odd published paper documenting its history. Fortunately, the Internet Archive (https://archive.org/) contains remnants.