You are Giving Away Your Memories to Social Media
According to Facebook, there are 350 million new photos added every day and by now around 250 billion photos have been uploaded to the giant social media platform since it started. There are 95 million Instagram posts shared every day and there are more than 3 billion snaps sent every single day.
Millions of people are documenting and sharing their everyday moments from the start to the end of the day in hope of keeping their memories alive forever. But is that what’s happening really? Are we really remembering these amazing parties and intimate moments forever?
A paper was published on May 2018 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology by Diana Tamir of Princeton University, who led a series of three studies where researchers explored how people are affected by the photos and videos they take and share.
Researchers showed that people who recorded and shared their experiences on various social media platforms were not able to remember the events in their brains precisely than those who were not sharing their experiences on social media.
The research found that there was no compromise in terms of enjoyment for anyone. Everyone was equally in the moment and there was no difference in experience and engagement.
But those who shared their memories or wrote things down from their experiences were found to be 10% less precise about their experience. Researchers concluded that social media is not completely responsible for this because even writing down and just having the thought of sharing made people less preservable.
People were asked to attend a TED talk and some were told to just listen and engage in the show and others were asked to write about it which they would later share. Just the thought of remembering and reproducing the experiences in any way led to the loss of something from their original experience.
Before the social media, our minds stored things in a distributive way. But, now our minds store things that we intend to remember and things that we intend to just keep in separate places.
Before the internet, our minds wanted to store and keep more things in them for a long time. But now, because all that we need is in our pockets all the time, we are neglecting things. This ease of getting information so easily is also called the “Google Effect”.
With the advent of smartphones and social media, we are not only neglecting knowledge but the memory of our most amazing experiences. We are indeed uploading these experiences to these unlimited storage houses, but what remains in our memories are just getting diminished.
What we can learn from this research is that we should focus on our experiences more than on memorizing it. But yeah, it’s not a bad thing to share your experiences as long as we don’t mind having to look back through the photos to re-experience a memory because we can still enjoy our experiences as much.
But if you want to recall a place and feel that moment every time you close your eyes, it’s just better to leave your phone at home.
Focus on how to be social, not on how to do social.
