It has long been believed that individual human memory has been strengthened by the storage, representational, reproductive, and connective capacities of technologies and media. However, such views of how memory works are being challenged amidst today's digital maelstrom. In particular, the Internet, and social media platforms, have profoundly transformed the ways individuals receive, store, share, and lose information. Memory has become more externalized, dialogical, and transactive, yet at the same time, unwieldy, opaque, and inaccessible. In The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media, Qi Wang and Andrew Hoskins have assembled scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and media and communication studies to synthesize emerging social and cognitive science research on the impact of the Internet and social media on remembering and forgetting. They probe whether human memory is being threatened by a shift from a healthy reliance to a dependency on digital media and technologies. The book illuminates theoretical and empirical research which shows the consequences of human entanglements with the Internet and social media for memory representation, expression, and socialization in individuals and the implications for the family, community, and society. Gathering the leading international scholars of Memory Studies together, this volume offers a new interdisciplinary agenda of inquiry into the digital remaking of individual, collective, and cultural memory.

Thanks to Facebook and Instagram, our childhoods have been captured and preserved online, never to go away. But what happens when we can’t leave our most embarrassing moments behind? Until recently, the awkward moments of growing up could be forgotten. But today we may be on the verge of losing the ability to leave our pasts behind. In The End of Forgetting, Kate Eichhorn explores what happens when images of our younger selves persist, often remaining just a click away. For today’s teenagers, many of whom spend hours each day posting on social media platforms, efforts to move beyond moments they regret face new and seemingly insurmountable obstacles. Unlike a high school yearbook or a shoebox full of old photos, the information that accumulates on social media is here to stay. What was once fleeting is now documented and tagged, always ready to surface and interrupt our future lives. Moreover, new innovations such as automated facial recognition also mean that the reappearance of our past is increasingly out of our control. Historically, growing up has been about moving on—achieving a safe distance from painful events that typically mark childhood and adolescence. But what happens when one remains tethered to the past? From the earliest days of the internet, critics have been concerned that it would endanger the innocence of childhood. The greater danger, Eichhorn warns, may ultimately be what happens when young adults find they are unable to distance themselves from their pasts. Rather than a childhood cut short by a premature loss of innocence, the real crisis of the digital age may be the specter of a childhood that can never be forgotten.

Finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize in General Nonfiction: “Nicholas Carr has written a Silent Spring for the literary mind.”—Michael Agger, Slate “Is Google making us stupid?” When Nicholas Carr posed that question, in a celebrated Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: As we enjoy the Net’s bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply? Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration of the Internet’s intellectual and cultural consequences yet published. As he describes how human thought has been shaped through the centuries by “tools of the mind”—from the alphabet to maps, to the printing press, the clock, and the computer—Carr interweaves a fascinating account of recent discoveries in neuroscience by such pioneers as Michael Merzenich and Eric Kandel. Our brains, the historical and scientific evidence reveals, change in response to our experiences. The technologies we use to find, store, and share information can literally reroute our neural pathways. Building on the insights of thinkers from Plato to McLuhan, Carr makes a convincing case that every information technology carries an intellectual ethic—a set of assumptions about the nature of knowledge and intelligence. He explains how the printed book served to focus our attention, promoting deep and creative thought. In stark contrast, the Internet encourages the rapid, distracted sampling of small bits of information from many sources. Its ethic is that of the industrialist, an ethic of speed and efficiency, of optimized production and consumption—and now the Net is remaking us in its own image. We are becoming ever more adept at scanning and skimming, but what we are losing is our capacity for concentration, contemplation, and reflection. Part intellectual history, part popular science, and part cultural criticism, The Shallows sparkles with memorable vignettes—Friedrich Nietzsche wrestling with a typewriter, Sigmund Freud dissecting the brains of sea creatures, Nathaniel Hawthorne contemplating the thunderous approach of a steam locomotive—even as it plumbs profound questions about the state of our modern psyche. This is a book that will forever alter the way we think about media and our minds.

This book studies how our personal memory is transformed as a result of technological and cultural transformations: digital photo cameras, camcorders, and multimedia computers inevitably change the way we remember and affect conventional forms of recollection.

A revelatory and timely look at how technology boosts our cognitive abilities—making us smarter, more productive, and more creative than ever It’s undeniable—technology is changing the way we think. But is it for the better? Amid a chorus of doomsayers, Clive Thompson delivers a resounding “yes.” In Smarter Than You Think, Thompson shows that every technological innovation—from the written word to the printing press to the telegraph—has provoked the very same anxieties that plague us today. We panic that life will never be the same, that our attentions are eroding, that culture is being trivialized. But, as in the past, we adapt—learning to use the new and retaining what is good of the old. Smarter Than You Think embraces and extols this transformation, presenting an exciting vision of the present and the future.

It has long been believed that individual human memory has been strengthened by the storage, representational, reproductive, and connective capacities of technologies and media. However, such views of how memory works are being challenged amidst today's digital maelstrom. In particular, the Internet, and social media platforms, have profoundly transformed the ways individuals receive, store, share, and lose information. Memory has become more externalized, dialogical, and transactive, yet at the same time, unwieldy, opaque, and inaccessible. In The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media, Qi Wang and Andrew Hoskins have assembled scholars from cognitive psychology, philosophy, neuroscience, and media and communication studies to synthesize emerging social and cognitive science research on the impact of the Internet and social media on remembering and forgetting. They probe whether human memory is being threatened by a shift from a healthy reliance to a dependency on digital media and technologies. The book illuminates theoretical and empirical research which shows the consequences of human entanglements with the Internet and social media for memory representation, expression, and socialization in individuals and the implications for the family, community, and society. Gathering the leading international scholars of Memory Studies together, this volume offers a new interdisciplinary agenda of inquiry into the digital remaking of individual, collective, and cultural memory.

We remember in social contexts. We reminisce about the past together, collaborate to remember shared experiences, and remember in the context of our communities and cultures. This book explores the topic of collaborative remembering across a wide range of fields, including developmental, cognitive, and social psychology.

We live in a world unimaginable only decades ago: a domain of backlit screens, instant information, and vibrant experiences that can outcompete dreary reality. Our brave new technologies offer incredible opportunities for work and play. But at what price? Now renowned neuroscientist Susan Greenfield—known in the United Kingdom for challenging entrenched conventional views—brings together a range of scientific studies, news events, and cultural criticism to create an incisive snapshot of “the global now.” Disputing the assumption that our technologies are harmless tools, Greenfield explores whether incessant exposure to social media sites, search engines, and videogames is capable of rewiring our brains, and whether the minds of people born before and after the advent of the Internet differ. Stressing the impact on Digital Natives—those who’ve never known a world without the Internet—Greenfield exposes how neuronal networking may be affected by unprecedented bombardments of audiovisual stimuli, how gaming can shape a chemical landscape in the brain similar to that in gambling addicts, how surfing the Net risks placing a premium on information rather than on deep knowledge and understanding, and how excessive use of social networking sites limits the maturation of empathy and identity. But Mind Change also delves into the potential benefits of our digital lifestyle. Sifting through the cocktail of not only threat but opportunity these technologies afford, Greenfield explores how gaming enhances vision and motor control, how touch tablets aid students with developmental disabilities, and how political “clicktivism” foments positive change. In a world where adults spend ten hours a day online, and where tablets are the common means by which children learn and play, Mind Change reveals as never before the complex physiological, social, and cultural ramifications of living in the digital age. A book that will be to the Internet what An Inconvenient Truth was to global warming, Mind Change is provocative, alarming, and a call to action to ensure a future in which technology fosters—not frustrates—deep thinking, creativity, and true fulfillment. Praise for Mind Change “Greenfield’s application of the mismatch between human and machine to the brain introduces an important variation on this pervasive view of technology. . . . She has a rare talent for explaining science in accessible prose.”—The Washington Post “Greenfield’s focus is on bringing to light the implications of Internet-induced ‘mind change’—as comparably multifaceted as the issue of climate change, she argues, and just as important.”—Chicago Tribune “Mind Change is exceedingly well organized and hits the right balance between academic and provocative.”—Booklist “[A] challenging, stimulating perspective from an informed neuroscientist on a complex, fast-moving, hugely consequential field.”—Kirkus Reviews “[Greenfield] is not just an engaging communicator but a thoughtful, responsible scientist, and the arguments she makes are well-supported and persuasive.”—Mail on Sunday “Greenfield’s admirable goal to prove an empirical basis for discussion is . . . an important one.”—Financial Times “An important presentation of an uncomfortable minority position.”—Jaron Lanier, Nature

This challenging book, with excellent contributions from international social scientists, focuses on the link between body and memory that specifically refers to the use of digital technologies. Neuroscientists know very well that human beings automatically and unconsciously organize their experience in their bodies into spatial units whose confines are established by changes in location, temporality and the interactive elements that determine it. Our memories might be less reliable than those of the average computer, but they are just as capacious, much more flexible, and even more user-friendly. The aim of the present book is to outline, by the body, what we know of the sociology of memory. The authors and editors believe that an analysis at the sociological level will prove valuable in throwing light on accounts of human behavior at the interpersonal and social level, and will play an important role in our capacity to understand the neurobiological factors that underpin the various types of memory. This book is an ideal resource for advanced and postgraduate students in social sciences, as well as practitioners in the field of Information and Communication technologies. Scholarly and accessible in tone, Learning from Memory: Body, Memory and Technology in a Globalizing World will be read and enjoyed by members of the general public and the professional audience alike.

The first book on the philosophy and aesthetics of digital preservation examines the challenge posed by new media to our long-term social memory. How will our increasingly digital civilization persist beyond our lifetimes? Audio and videotapes demagnetize; CDs delaminate; Internet art links to websites that no longer exist; Amiga software doesn't run on iMacs. In Re-collection, Richard Rinehart and Jon Ippolito argue that the vulnerability of new media art illustrates a larger crisis for social memory. They describe a variable media approach to rescuing new media, distributed across producers and consumers who can choose appropriate strategies for each endangered work. New media art poses novel preservation and conservation dilemmas. Given the ephemerality of their mediums, software art, installation art, and interactive games may be heading to obsolescence and oblivion. Rinehart and Ippolito, both museum professionals, examine the preservation of new media art from both practical and theoretical perspectives, offering concrete examples that range from Nam June Paik to Danger Mouse. They investigate three threats to twenty-first-century creativity: technology, because much new media art depends on rapidly changing software or hardware; institutions, which may rely on preservation methods developed for older mediums; and law, which complicates access with intellectual property constraints such as copyright and licensing. Technology, institutions, and law, however, can be enlisted as allies rather than enemies of ephemeral artifacts and their preservation. The variable media approach that Rinehart and Ippolito propose asks to what extent works to be preserved might be medium-independent, translatable into new mediums when their original formats are obsolete.