SUMMARY - Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?

Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte

Escola de Ciências e Tecnologia

Bacharelado em Ciências e Tecnologia

Práticas de Leitura e Escrita em Inglês

Professora Drª. Marcela Aparecida Cucci Silvestre

Evandro Henrique Roque Pereira Júnior Turma 5

Guilherme de Rosso Manços – Turma 5

SUMMARY

Piece of Mind: Is the Internet Replacing Our Ability to Remember?

            The internet is in all corners of the world. Because of this, information is near-ubiquitous. The question is: is the internet replacing our ability to remember? The answer for these question, according some researchers, is NO.

            The social psychologist Daniel Wegner says that the Internet has become a primary form of external or "transactive" memory. In a summarized explanation, “transactive” memory is where information is stored collectively outside the brain.

            Comparing our times to the past, internet is just replacing books, libraries, notes, which people were used to rely their information’s source. Now, however, besides oral and printed sources of information, our collective and institutional knowledge bases reside online and in data storage.

            The psychologist Betsy Sparrow, give us an example. On TV, she saw an actress whose face she could not quite place. Using internet she quickly discovered that the actress was Angela Lansbury. Rather than search on internet, she would have asked a friend or consult a cinema reference book.

            Talking about the importance, rather than memorize, Sparrow consider it is far more important to understand information on a conceptual level.

John Suler, in agreement with Sparrow, suspect “that we're still going to remember information that's important to us, while relying on the Internet to verify what we think might be true or have forgotten, and to provide new information to which we were never exposed”. In a nutshell, even with “transactive” memory, we did not lose the ability to remember or memorize.

To finalize, the Internet is just like any other memory system—the need for critical thinking does not diminish, regardless of where the information is stored.