We, as humans, have always been storytellers. Our earliest histories were passed on from one member of the species to another orally. With the invention of the printing press we were able to mass produce what once was only a passing tale. Now we compose nearly 3.6 trillion words or 36 million books daily. In comparison the Library of congress only holds about 35 million books. (Thompson, 2013 p. 47) Information is no longer a treasured resource to be kept caged and protected. Thompson’s argument against the theory that technology is not “making us dumb” is a valued one. How does this collective knowledge base known as the internet affect us as a culture.
In the 1980’s Daniel Wegner and Ralph Erber began to explore the phenomenon of transactive memory: two heads are better than one. (p. 125) The idea of transactive memory is simple, we, as a culture, share in remembering facts. Thompson gives a great example of one of Wegner's experiments in which a couple, married 40 plus years, is asked about a show they saw during their honeymoon. The couple begins to execute something called “cross-cuing” (p. 125) where they both fill in missing parts of the others memory until they arrive at the same conclusion. (They saw a play called Desert Song with John hanson in it.) (p. 125) Thompson uses this example to demonstrate that the greater the base of knowledge, like internet, the greater our ability to retrieve information from others. The couple in Wegner's experiment were “Googling” each others brains or as he wrote. “Couples who are able to remember things transactively offer their constituent individuals storage for and access to a far wider array of information they would otherwise command.” (p.126) With the internet our constituents have become global. Because of this we now have “access to a far wider array of information” on a scale that has never been seen before.
Communities, both physical and digital ones, allow this transactive memory to shape our interactions on a day to day basis. We, as a culture, no longer have to memorize facts, dates, or multiplication tables we simply ask our constituents if they know the answer. But what happens to a community when basic facts are lost. Thompson also tackles this question in stating that we use “general knowledge” we have retained from reading a newspaper last week or overhearing a conversation in a bar in order to acquire ‘precise” information from the transactive memory or the internet. (p. 129)
Communities can be a s far reaching in scope as wikipedia or very specific like my grandmother's bingo circle. Each group has their own transctive memory that adds to and advances the social and connected memory of our culture.
References
Thompson, C. (2013). Smarter than you think: How technology is changing our minds for the better. New York: The Penguin press.
A great video by Jaclyn Silver, that better explains the idea and concept of memory, specificly transactive memory.
In the 1980’s Daniel Wegner and Ralph Erber began to explore the phenomenon of transactive memory: two heads are better than one. (p. 125) The idea of transactive memory is simple, we, as a culture, share in remembering facts. Thompson gives a great example of one of Wegner's experiments in which a couple, married 40 plus years, is asked about a show they saw during their honeymoon. The couple begins to execute something called “cross-cuing” (p. 125) where they both fill in missing parts of the others memory until they arrive at the same conclusion. (They saw a play called Desert Song with John hanson in it.) (p. 125) Thompson uses this example to demonstrate that the greater the base of knowledge, like internet, the greater our ability to retrieve information from others. The couple in Wegner's experiment were “Googling” each others brains or as he wrote. “Couples who are able to remember things transactively offer their constituent individuals storage for and access to a far wider array of information they would otherwise command.” (p.126) With the internet our constituents have become global. Because of this we now have “access to a far wider array of information” on a scale that has never been seen before.
Communities, both physical and digital ones, allow this transactive memory to shape our interactions on a day to day basis. We, as a culture, no longer have to memorize facts, dates, or multiplication tables we simply ask our constituents if they know the answer. But what happens to a community when basic facts are lost. Thompson also tackles this question in stating that we use “general knowledge” we have retained from reading a newspaper last week or overhearing a conversation in a bar in order to acquire ‘precise” information from the transactive memory or the internet. (p. 129)
Communities can be a s far reaching in scope as wikipedia or very specific like my grandmother's bingo circle. Each group has their own transctive memory that adds to and advances the social and connected memory of our culture.
References
Thompson, C. (2013). Smarter than you think: How technology is changing our minds for the better. New York: The Penguin press.
A great video by Jaclyn Silver, that better explains the idea and concept of memory, specificly transactive memory.