Google and Memory, Technology and Thinking, and the Rush to Judgement

Thoughts on the new search engine/memory study, as commented on by Jonah Lehrer:

I think the researchers involved in this are overly sanguine. Not in a way that compromises the research — it’s sound work — but whether and how “online transactive” memory compares to “social transactive” memory is entirely speculative. No head-to-head comparisons have been run, and even social transactive memory is a poorly quantified phenomenon based on a handful of couples studies.

Moreover, it would be appropriate to speculate that, even if online and social transactive memory are equivalent in quality, quantity could still matter: I.e., what happens if social transactive almost entirely replaces internal? And then there’s the question of how social and online transactive memory translate into other cognitive processes not measured by so-far-preliminary investigations: How do they affect, for better or worse, insight and creativity and other forms of learning? The latter question is especially difficult to study in a rigorous way.

Personally, I lean more towards the Carr camp. That’s my inclination and anecdotal experience, and technorati cheerleading strikes me as more biased, wishful and assumption-based than techno-skeptic contrarianism. Of course I could be wrong: Perhaps the cognitive effects of online transactive learning and other online/digital tools will be overwhelmingly positive. But as we explore these issues, we need to be very clear about the boundaries scope of our methodologies, and careful in drawing larger conclusions from limited, narrow data.