New research has found that people who record and share their experiences on social media have inaccurate memories of actual events themselves.
Sponsored Links
You might think that sharing pictures at Cochella's epic party or anniversary dinner will evoke many years of memory, but according to Science, recording every moment of your life will actually make you remember life experiences to a great extent. It fades. The three studies, led by Diana Tamir of Princeton University and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, explored how photographs and videos taken to share photos and videos on social media influenced participants'experiences. Enjoyment, participation and memory. To do this, they had participants watch Ted's speech (you know, the rich and fascinating videos ranging from guerrilla gardening in south-central Los Angeles to the hidden power of smiles). The second group was sent to Stanford University Campus Church for a self-service tour. Everyone was told to record their experiences in various ways: taking pictures or taking notes of events, recording but not keeping them, sharing them on social media, or just reflecting them internally. Participants were asked how much they enjoyed the experience and how much they cared about it. They were also asked about their memories of the event.
Although the results of the study reduced the relaxation of instantaneous enjoyment in social media (those who shared their experiences on social media more or less did not enjoy them and had similar participation), participants'memories were suppressed. They performed 10% poorly on memory tests. However, because those who did not intend to share photos or take notes got the same results, the researchers did not believe that social media was entirely responsible. It is the act of externalizing experience - copying experience in any way - that distracts people from the original experience.
Sponsored Links
According to Time magazine, these findings are rooted in research on transactional memory: how we segment and store information. There are internal storage, basically what we decide to remember, and there are external storage, which we store elsewhere. Before the advent of the Internet, internal storage was a person's idea, and external storage was related to experts and books.
Obviously, it takes a lot of effort to retrieve external information within a day, so people have to rely more on their internal memory. But then the Internet came along, and getting information became as easy as typing words in search engines. Why store so much information inside, and you can easily extract it with a mouse stroke, right? Researchers call it the Google effect, and yes, most of us feel guilty about it. Although we know where to find the vast amount of external information we need, we neglect to absorb it. Researchers believe that the same thing is being done in current research: it is not only our externalized knowledge and interesting facts, but also the memory of various experiences. Although we may have photographs of these experiences, in the process, memory may be reduced. It's sad, isn't it?
This is not the first offense of social media. From advocating narcissism, disrupting interpersonal relationships, having a negative impact on young people, to advocating FOMO, fear of missing, it seems that there are no shortcomings in social media. Keep healthy!
Learn more : How to detoxify social media and still have friends