Monday, October 10, 2016

Digital Amnesia In Practice (mobile phone use)

       From the unlimited access to information on the internet, to the smartphones that we carry all of our information on, technology is changing the way our brains store information. With infinite information only a few clicks away, it tends to be very natural for us to rely on digital devices to store the info we otherwise would have to remember. This is called 'the google effect', or 'digital amnesia'.

       Digital Amnesia In Practice

       The Kaspersky Lab shows us that most phone customers in the United Kingdom can't remember important phone numbers from memory including; those of their children, their children's schools, their place of work, their partner. However, half of these interviewed people could easily recall their home phone number from when they were younger. This directly shows how nowadays people don't bother to store certain crucial information, simply because they know it is available to them through their everyday mobile device.
       Researchers say that as we store more information on mobile phones, our brain is actually encouraged to forget the information it formerly stored. This is due to our limited brain capacity.

       Modern Day Reliance

       Kaspersky's lab shows that over half of the younger people surveyed, admitted that their phone holds pretty much all of what they need to know. Clearly, this shows how crucial smartphones and that other technology has become in regards to the information we rely on day to day. This study shows that the loss of a person's smartphone can not only be inconvenient, but devastating. Almost half (44%) of women surveyed, said they would be overwhelmed and saddened if they lost their smartphone due to the fact that they believed they would lose memories they could never get back. Also, a quarter of the women surveyed (and 38% of the younger people surveyed) said they would be 'completely frantic' since their smartphone is their primary source of data, images and contact information. Years ago these images would be tangible, and the contact information would be mostly stored in your brain and written down somewhere as a backup, not as a primary source of the info.

References:
http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/digital-amnesia-kaspersky-1.3262600 , https://blog.kaspersky.com/digital-amnesia-survival/9194


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