Have you ever heard of the theory of transactive memory? I hadn’t either until recently – it came up in one of Malcolm Gladwell’s podcasts. Its a great podcast, and a fascinating concept.
Transactive memory is the idea that we store some of our knowledge in other people’s minds. To be more specific, we store our own knowledge in our memory, but we also store meta-memory. We store the location of pieces or bodies of knowledge that we don’t have on our own internal hard-drive. For example, my sisters store “how to change an alternator” in my head. They don’t have the knowledge themselves, but they’ve stored the location of that body of knowledge, and somehow the actual doing of the task, with me. Lucky me.
A rather poignant example that Gladwell uses to illustrate this concept is that of a married couple. Picture a couple who have been married over 60 years. Over the course of that marriage, each person would have stored countless pieces of knowledge in their partner’s head. Everything from how to use the remote or which piece of silverware to start with first at a fancy dinner, to how to communicate lovingly with a wayward child, or why it’s important to keep inviting family over for dinner.
Now imagine what happens when one partner dies. The surviving partner literally loses a part of their memory, a part of themselves. It’s hard to comprehend.
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Shifting gears from the poignant to the practical.
I think it’s important to point out that this theory existed before the internet. In fact, it was first developed in 1985, by a man named Daniel Wegner. Check out the wikipedia page if you’re interested.
The theory of transactive memory was first posited in a time when its application had to do, primarily, with other humans. The metamemory we stored generally contained locations to bodies of knowledge in the people around us. But now, in the age of the internet, we literally, transactively, store bodies of information on external drives (think Google, Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, etc.).
There has been a big, and not obviously good, shift in the amount of real memory that we store vs metamemory. More so now than ever before, our heads are filled with metamemory, the location of bodies of knowledge and not the knowledge itself.
I know, I know, what about books? We had books in 1985, we stored bodies of knowledge in books, accessible through our own metamemory – how is the internet different?
I see two massive differences:
1. The shear volume of information available.
- In the history of mankind – from the beginning to today – we’ve written 130 million books. Give or take.
- Right now, 3 billion internet users produce 2.5 billion gigabytes of data each day and 75% of that data is unstructured, meaning it comes from sources like text, video, and audio.
- To provide a little bit of perspective, 1 gb can store about 64,000 pages from a .word file.
2. The accessibility of that information.
- All of the data on the internet is accessible through a device we all carry with us throughout the day, and sleep next to at night. Our loving partner the smartphone.
- In 1985, you still had to leave the house to go to the library to access just a small percentage of the information that man-kind had produced.
For the theory of transactive memory, the internet is the holy grail. I can store every part of me online except; my physical body and some of the intangible things that make me human, such as my emotional profile and my own unique relationship and experience with consciousness. I can store everything else online.
This should scare you. It scares me.
It scares me because we’ve started to store metamemory – not memory – on things like what we should think, or our sense of social inclusion, or even our relationships with the people we love. The internet becomes a proxy for independent thinking, for real interaction with people, and for treating the people we love as we should. The result is that, with increasing frequency, we don’t actually know how to do these things but we know we can consult the internet to figure it out.
To be clear, I think the internet is a great thing. Its the great equalizer. It has the power to lift people out of poverty, to end hunger, to start a revolution, to change your mind, etc. My point is that we should be really aware of what we delegate to the internet and what we keep for ourselves. If we don’t do this deliberately, than we risk giving up pieces of who we are to a system of ones and zeros.
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The theory of transactive memory – read its it’s 1985 context – is beautiful. It suggests that nobody can make it on their own – that we all need people to help us as we make our way through life. However, where in 1985 we may have stored a piece of ourselves with another person, in 2018 we store those same pieces of ourselves online.
I think we lose something intangible and significant by storing knowledge online instead of with people in our lives. I think we lose elements of who we are. We lose complexity in our relationships with each-other and with consciousness itself. What was once 4 dimensional complexity, now becomes 2 dimensional and flat.
Think about that couple I described at the beginning, married 60 years. When one partner dies the other loses a part of themselves. I can’t fathom the sadness and pain that must manifest from that kind of loss. But I have to imagine that kind pain only manifests because the relationship was full of connection, and love, and meaning. It was full of a lifetime of depending on each other.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t store bodies of knowledge online, just that we should be thoughtful about it.
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My challenge to us is this: trust the people in your life with the things you don’t know or can’t quite figure out. It’s a much richer experience to store metamemory that leads you to a person, instead of a website.
MW 