Do You Suffer From Digital Amnesia?

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Acccording to this article, connected devices are causing digital amnesia. At least that's what I think it said, I can't remember now. ;)

A new report from Kaspersky Lab calls this phenomenon 'digital amnesia'. It surveyed over 1,000 consumers across the US and finds that 91 percent of them say they use the Internet as an online extension of their brain.
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or its making everyone smarter .... way to put a negative spin on it
 
I've had a few people bring this up, since I'm an avid Google/search user. My analogous response has usually been that when I was young, before the internet as we know it basically, we had books where we held data that wasn't in our brain, and that I don't see what's different really other than the internet can go off. And I still have books full of data. I get why people look at it that way, but it's an incomplete thought imo.
 
Guess I'd better stop using the Internet to house the manuals for the software I use at work. Time to FIRE UP THE PRINTER!
 
Skynet realizes through the Teminator movies that it can't win by building war machines. It is making us dependent on the Internet and then when they shut it down, we will be their slaves.
 
Ramses said:
I've had a few people bring this up, since I'm an avid Google/search user. My analogous response has usually been that when I was young, before the internet as we know it basically, we had books where we held data that wasn't in our brain, and that I don't see what's different really other than the internet can go off. And I still have books full of data. I get why people look at it that way, but it's an incomplete thought imo.
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We do not remember nor care to remember that which is easily accessible to us.

IE: I don't remember how long to cook chicken for, quick google and I have the answer. If I didn't have access to the internet I'd remember.

Growing up I had my parents work numbers memorized, my house, grandparents, friends, etc.... Now all I know by heart is my cell phone number, both personal and work. No point is memorizing any other numbers when they are right at my finger tips.
 
Yeah, I find myself Googling something that's at the tip of my tongue instead of thinking a little more about it. :eek:
 
hity645 said:
We do not remember nor care to remember that which is easily accessible to us.

IE: I don't remember how long to cook chicken for, quick google and I have the answer. If I didn't have access to the internet I'd remember.

Growing up I had my parents work numbers memorized, my house, grandparents, friends, etc.... Now all I know by heart is my cell phone number, both personal and work. No point is memorizing any other numbers when they are right at my finger tips.
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Yep pretty much. People making this argument for some reason think there has been a fundamental change in the ability to remember or learn. It's not, it's just convenience. I veiw stuff like Google and the internet in general as a little payoff for having to put up with the assorted other BS parts of modern life. I'm gonna use the crap out of it myself.

Going even further, I hope they are starting to teach kids how to find information, I firmly believe the ability to quickly and accurately locate data out of the huge free pile of it most of us have access to is going to become a required life skill, more than it already is. Like using an Encyclopedia or Thesaurus or Dictionary or card catalog at the library was not so many years ago. No doubt some people are going to be more up the proverbial creek than others if they suddenly don't have access to modern data retrieval methods, but those same people would have been screwed if you took away books years back so what's the diff? Way it seems to me anyway.

The other side, or another part, of this is that there are a lot of people that know "just enough to be dangerous" as the old saying goes since knowledge is so readily accessible now. That has it's ups and downs for sure, but overall I still think it's a positive thing.
 
bleh!

I still write down stuff then transcribe it into my phone/PC/etc. Backups and redundancy FTW. I can't recite the Krebs Cycle for that matter, since I have no important use for that information.
 
We probably remember several dozen URL's that we didn't have to before, many dozens of passwords and of course a wide variety of technical knowledge to use our gadgets. We're still using our memories, but for different things.
 
well... it´s not really amnesia if i´ve just put the number in ONCE and it´s hopefully forever stored in the cloud. but yeah "digtal amnesia"

it´s probably why Kaspersky can´t beat Bitdefender xD everyone at Kaspersky says they have "Digital Amnesia" if they can´t find a fix.
 
When I grow up, I'm gonna have so much amnesia!
I mean, I have it now, but I forgot.
 
Ramses said:
Going even further, I hope they are starting to teach kids how to find information, I firmly believe the ability to quickly and accurately locate data out of the huge free pile of it most of us have access to is going to become a required life skill, more than it already is. Like using an Encyclopedia or Thesaurus or Dictionary or card catalog at the library was not so many years ago.
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When my elementary school's library first got a computer with a cd-rom the internet and, they taught kids how to properly construct Boolean logic search queries and refine them to locate information effectively. This is such a basic skill for modern society and yet everyone I see is typing full sentences into Google. Schools should be teaching this and other basic computer skills that don't revolve around technology thinking for them and providing the "best" answer.

Why does my cat ……?
What is Kim Kardashian's favorite ……?
How do I …… on my iPhone?

Without proper search queries, search engines are effectively useless for research and information, returning only pop-culture clickbait, content farms, and fake reviews. Unfortunately, Google modified their search engine several times catering to this and is now filled with advertisements and fake SEO results.
 
It used to be a lot easier to get real-people results, that's for sure. I really miss the search Groups option, I use a search string for specific forums or whatever but it was a quick way to get past the commercial crap.
Which is probably why it's gone.
 
I totally thought this was about my condition when I forget what I just fapped to due to the over abundance of internet pron.
 
I've said this forever. These days we do a quick search on something and it's stored in our short-term memory; we don't hold onto it long for it shuffled over to our long-term memory.
 
Related to this, I've seen the same thing happen with gaming as interfaces have simplified. In the old days, games like Wizardry 7, Eye of the Beholder, Loom, even the Sierra "quest" games, you often needed to map out where you went and where you wanted to go on graph paper, keep track of plot points, quests, needed items, and areas visited all on your own. Now it's so much easier since the games keep track of everything automatically, and having gotten so used to it, it seems much harder than it used to be when you go back and try to play some of the older games.

I'm not against auto-mapping or anything (it saves time too if you can just select a quest waypoint and autonav someplace), it just takes out some of the work you used to have to do yourself, but things like branching and selecting options, mixing items, keeping track of quests, etc. are all neatly presented to you and much less of an anything-goes interface that made it pretty common to need a hint book when you got stuck.

Of course, without having all these websites, passwords, and user accounts to keep track of, it was easier to focus on the games!
 
Synful Serenity said:
Related to this, I've seen the same thing happen with gaming as interfaces have simplified. In the old days, games like Wizardry 7, Eye of the Beholder, Loom, even the Sierra "quest" games, you often needed to map out where you went and where you wanted to go on graph paper, keep track of plot points, quests, needed items, and areas visited all on your own. Now it's so much easier since the games keep track of everything automatically, and having gotten so used to it, it seems much harder than it used to be when you go back and try to play some of the older games.

I'm not against auto-mapping or anything (it saves time too if you can just select a quest waypoint and autonav someplace), it just takes out some of the work you used to have to do yourself, but things like branching and selecting options, mixing items, keeping track of quests, etc. are all neatly presented to you and much less of an anything-goes interface that made it pretty common to need a hint book when you got stuck.

Of course, without having all these websites, passwords, and user accounts to keep track of, it was easier to focus on the games!
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Extend that out to real life mapping. Before, you'd track your course on a physical map, or even Google Maps a little later, but printed it out and had to think about where you were going. Nowadays, you just do what the Navigation system tells you to do, even if it makes you drive off a bridge and into a river (Apple Maps :D).
 
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