Bouncing Off the Meniscus

Science has proved that people who don't need to remember things will not make the effort to remember them; or, as Britain's leading liberal newspaper hath it, "Poor memory? Blame Google". Researchers at Columbia University have discovered that people tend not to make the effort to remember data when they have the option of simply remembering where the data can be found. Somehow or other this is all Google's fault, as may be seen from the unhealthy contrast with the good old days when we all remembered everything and when note-pads, indexes, filing cabinets and (shudder) paper diaries were purely the stuff of science-fiction nightmares like Hansard or Pamela. "First it was a search engine. Then it became almost synonymous with the internet. Now Google is a replacement for the ancient human faculty of memory," blathers the story's first paragraph, thus achieving the near-Murdochian ratio of two fatuous falses to one bleeding obvious. The internet has become "an external memory source that we can access at any time" - which apparently is news to some at Britain's leading liberal newspaper. A somewhat deeper exploration of the issue can be found here.