Media, technology, and the sins of memory

Technology has transformed how people interact with one another. According to two recent Pew Research Center surveys (2021a; 2021b), 97 per cent of United States adults have a cell phone, 85 per cent have a smartphone, 93 per cent use the Internet, and 77 per cent have broadband Internet access at home. The Internet has opened countless doors by providing unprecedented access to information and connecting people. While we know from laboratory research that context and collaboration can influence memory, little is known about how virtual collaboration affects memory and whether in-person studies generalise to virtual contexts. In this article, we discuss the challenges, value, and broader relevance of extending laboratory-based memory research to online platforms. In doing so, we report a virtual collaborative memory paradigm, where we examine individual and social remembering in a fully online, chat-based setting, and present data from two completely virtual experiments. In Experiment 1, online participants studied a word list and, in a chatroom, recalled the words either alone (as controls) or with two other participants. Surprisingly, collaborative inhibition – the robust finding of lower recall in collaborative groups than controls – disappeared. This outcome occurred because participants who worked alone recalled less than what we see in in-person studies. In Experiment 2, where instructions were modified and an experimenter was present, individual performance improved, resulting in collaborative inhibition. We reflect on the contextualised nature of this effect in online settings, for both collaborative and individual remembering, and on the implications for the study of memory in the digital age.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 83%

Section: Online Social Rememberingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Social remembering in the digital age: Implications for virtual study, work, and social engagement

Peña

Greeley

2022

“…A likely explanation is that he integrated the vivid and memorable images of the first plane crash, which were widely broadcast in the media in the days following the attack, into his own memory. This example shows how suggestible our memory can be, but also how the media can influence it (Schacter 2022).…”

Section: Collective Memory Studies: Across Disciplines and Across Gen...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Collective memory: An hourglass between the collective and the individual

Cordonnier¹,

Rosoux

Gijs³

et al. 2022

Collective memories are memories shared by a group that influence their social identity. The goal of this paper is to focus on two major limitations in current studies on collective memory and show how the hourglass metaphor can overcome those limitations. The first limitation concerns the partial nature of studies devoted to the analysis of collective memory. Studies tend to focus either on the choice of the past (how memory agents mobilise the past) or the weight of the past (how the past affects the individual or the group). The second limitation relates to the temporal dimension of research conducted so far. Most studies only assess memory over a single generation, yet it can have long-term effects. In this paper, we suggest considering memory work as an hourglass, with the collective and the individual at opposite ends and the sand of memories passing from one to the other, filtered through family values and representations. The hourglass metaphor thus provides a helpful tool to explain the formation of collective memories over time and the interactions between the macro, meso, and micro levels. We approach the study of collective memory from an interdisciplinary perspective, mainly involving psychology, political science, and history. We conclude by suggesting three challenges that future studies of memory will need to address: (1) the need to combine multiple approaches; (2) the need to consider the role of generations; and (3) the need to bridge discussion across disciplines.

“…However, in relation to digital media and technology, the slowly emerging evidence does not support simple conclusions. Instead, it paints a complex picture of different effects that are dependent on different factors (Schacter 2022).…”

Section: Ecological Validitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Remembering in the wild: recontextualising and reconciling studies of media and memory

Fawns

2022

Studies that locate memory entirely within the head may pay less attention to the properties, practices or cultures of the media with which people remember than studies of ‘memory in the wild’, where memory is seen to extend beyond the individual, into the distributed activities of people and material things. While memory in the head is, apparently, individual and susceptible to universal effects, memory in the wild is emergent and relational. Studies of memory in the wild, therefore, produce results that are harder to pin down but may form a stronger basis for interpreting the importance of context. It is an important, interdisciplinary challenge to reconcile evidence from studies based on these different conceptions, so that we can better understand how people remember and forget, individually and collectively, and the relationship between context, environment, and memory. I argue that wherever memory is located or studied, all remembering can be framed as in the wild, and that doing so supports ecological validity, conceptual precision, reflexivity, and realistic application of conclusions beyond the research context. A key part of my argument is that the relationship between media, technology, and memory is situated, highly complex, and not easily generalisable. Remembering in the wild supports the conceptual precision needed to understand the subtle and entangled implications of technological change in relation to memory.