Evan Ratliff

Although the debate prompted by Carr’s piece has been wide ranging, the general issue at hand is whether and how our time spent online, hopping from one site to the next, affects the way we read, the way we think and the way we research (although often the discussions seem to reduce to just the question of reading online versus reading books). But I’m also interested in one aspect they touch on but don’t explicitly address: the effect of the Web and gadget usage on how and what we remember.

To take a trivial example that is no doubt true for a lot of people, I don’t memorize phone numbers anymore, even of friends and family members whom I call often. They’re stored in my phone, which I always have, so there just isn’t much incentive. So is that degrading my ability to remember 10-digit numbers? Perhaps because I’m in my 30s and had a cellphone for less than a decade, that skill — if indeed it is a skill — is already deeply ingrained. But what if I’d grown up never having memorized phone numbers? What about geographical or historical information, both of which I probably access online in surprisingly greater proportion to how often I access it from my own memory?

It seems logical to assume that the continual ability to look up information — now anytime, anywhere for a fair number of people with Web-enabled phones — must have some long-term impact on not only our desire to remember that information but the allocation of cognitive resources devoted to remembering it. But is that really true? And is it a negative? It’s possible that those resources are freed up for something more valuable. I’ve found very little reliable research on the topic. (The only study Carr cites, from University College London, describes how online readers exhibit “skimming behavior.” James Evans’ own study concerns how researchers approach scientific literature.)

It seems to me there might be one clue in the study of “transactive memory,” which at its most basic is “a shared system for encoding, storing, and retrieving information.” Defined by Harvard psychology professor Daniel Wegner and colleagues, transactive memory has been shown in married couples, who over time rely on each other to remember certain categories of information. So if the husband is better at remembering details from television programs, and the wife at remembering friends’ birthdays, they each hand off that responsibility to the other, and retrieve the information when they need it. Wenger describes it this way:

Each partner can enjoy the benefits of the pair’s memory by assuming responsibility for remembering just those items that fall clearly to him or to her and then by attending to the categories of knowledge encoded by the partner so that items within those categories can be retrieved from the partner when they are needed.

Perhaps the Web, then, is like a spouse who is around all the time, with a particular knack for factual memory of all varieties. Under that (admittedly armchair) theory, we would be getting the advantages of a memory freed to focus on other things, but the concurrent losses of potentially valuable abilities. But it still doesn’t address how permanent those changes are in your brain. Would your memory revert if you quit the Web cold turkey? Would you need to retrain it?

I’ve seen discussion of the implications of transactive memory for social epidemics (most famously in “The Tipping Point”) and group dynamics, but nothing on how it might play a role in our memories vis-à-vis the Internet. I’m no expert, though, so maybe someone can point me to that, or other research into how the Net is actually shaping our brain. There have to be doctoral students out there right now, working on clever studies about what having Google in your pocket does to your retentive abilities.

All of which has naturally generated a discussion about privacy and public spaces (along with the occasional guerrilla response), and newfound angst wherever the creepy Street View vehicles next land — most recently in Japan and Australia. On Friday, Chris Salzberg at GlobalVoices Online published a fascinating and nuanced look at Japanese views on the Street View’s recent arrival (worth a full read):

But as much as reaction has focused in other countries on private information such as license plates and personal identity, in Japan it is as much the less obvious cases of privacy infringement that provoke a reaction: seeing people’s clothes out on the line, open windows where robbers could break in, or cars parked in the parking lot.

Even after all the discussion, though, I was newly beguiled by this Street View image (via The Earth Is Square), from the end of a completely undeveloped dirt road in New South Wales, Australia:

Surf around a little, and you’ll find Street View Australia to be just as thorough elsewhere, turning up a collection of similarly remote locales.

Without belaboring the issue of Street View’s usefulness (and I have found it useful, for example, in apartment hunting) versus its scariness (and I find it minimally so, although I’m thankful that my own first-floor blinds were drawn when Google came knocking), these images struck me as both more amusing and more dispiriting than the more voyeuristic views. Amusing to think of the ridiculous little Google car bouncing up the road, determined to get a complete shot of a blank forest at which people on the other side of the world could gawk. But melancholy in the Conradian sense of the ever-shrinking blank spots on the map.

Granted, there are few places in the world left actually unmapped, or even uncatalogued by the kind of jaunty travel guides that Conrad himself once lamented were “more devastating to the world’s freshness of impression than a swarm of locusts in a field of young corn.” Street View is just the latest in a long line of humanity’s cartographic conquests, and who knows to what useful end those remote views can be put. (Indeed, how remote are they really if you can get there in a Street View car?) But even knowing all that, I still find something cheerless in the search giant of Mountain View mechanistically engorging itself on images of the world’s quiet places, for the sake of “complete coverage.”

I’m sure that this, like most Luddite urges, will pass with time and familiarity. Probably when I get one of those iPhone gadgets, with the fancy picture displays.