The Sunday Times (UK) reports about “preliminary findings” from a study of only 150 people where researchers are claiming that the prevalnce of electronic gadgets is destroying people’s short term memories. The Times quotes Japanese researcher Toshiyuki Sawaguchi complaining,
They’re losing the ability to remember new things, to pull out old data or to distinguish between important and unimportant information. It’s a type of brain dysfunction. Young people today are becoming stupid.
British researcher Pam Briggs isn’t quite as extreme in her conclusions but does say,
I think increased use of the internet and computer technology is starting to have an effect. Everyday memory might be at threat if you are using the computer as a kind of external memory.
Both of these arguments are simply an updating of one of the oldest anti-technology arguments in human history — Socrates’ argument against reading. Socrates, of course, could neither read nor write since literacy would not become widespread in Greece until the 4th century BC.
In the Phaedrus, Plato records a fable that Socrates told. In the fable the Egyptian King Thamus reviews the inventions of the god Theuth. Theuth explains the values of literacy telling King Thamus, “Using letters will make the Egyptians wiser and give them better memories. It is a specific both for the memory and for the wit.” Thamus, of course, will have none of it.
O most ingenious Theuth, the parent or inventor of an art is not always the best judge of the utility or inutility of his own inventions to the users of them. And in this instance, you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have.
For this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories. They will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves.
The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence. You give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth.
They will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing
They will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing
They will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality
Socrates himself — filtered through Plato — pronounces his own judgment upon writing that is not too far removed from Thamus,
I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves.
Both Socrates and the learned researchers cited in the Sunday Times are certainly correct — if the technology ends up using the individual rather than vice versa, it is certainly no boon. However, both writing and current electronic technologies aid both memory and understanding by reducing the amount of things that a person need remember at any given moment.
I have much better things to memorize, for example, than people’s phone numbers or birthdays and so I don’t. (On the other hand, I can remember many of the stories my daughter told me over the past couple months, which are far more important to me).