University of Gothenberg: Nostalgia and memories after ten years of social media. “As possibilities have changed and technology has advanced, memories and nostalgia are now a significant part of our use of social media. This is shown in a study from the University of Gothenburg and University West.”
University of Gothenberg: Nostalgia and memories after ten years of social media. “Researchers at the University of Gothenburg and University West have been following a group of eleven active social media users for ten years, allowing them to describe and reflect on how they use the platforms to document and share their lives. The study provides insight into the role of technology in creating experiences and reliving meaningful moments.”
Cornell Chronicle: Game-playing automaton acts like an ‘irrational’ human. “Researchers were able to simulate human behaviors using a probabilistic finite automaton, a well-known model of limited computational power. They programmed the automatons to compete against each other in a wildlife poaching game, as either a rhino poacher or a ranger trying to stop the poaching. When the automatons could remember everything, they settled into an optimal game strategy. But when researchers limited their memories, they took some decision-making shortcuts – the same kinds as actual humans playing the game.”
PsyPost: People attribute information they found online to their own memory instead of the internet. “Human cognition is now so intertwined with the internet, a knowledge-sharing system that can be accessed any time anywhere, that the boundaries between individual knowledge (i.e., personal memory) and collective knowledge (i.e., external online information) are becoming increasingly blurred. In other words, people may mistakenly believe that information they found online is from their personal memory.”
Michigan Daily: ‘Minecraft’ gave us the soundtrack to a generation. “I had never cared much for the soundtrack of ‘Minecraft,’ but when I first heard the mellow piano arpeggio of C418 [Daniel Rosenfeld]’s ‘Wet Hands’ fade in on my most recent playthrough, I was immediately transported from soulless, resource-gathering gameplay to another realm, one far beyond the menial tasks (both in the game and in real life) that kept me tethered down to this temporal dimension. I was instantly lost in ancient memories of the game, memories I didn’t even know I had. Within my mind, I casually meandered between entire years of my life: I had become unstuck in time.”
The Conversation: What happens to your life stories if you delete your Facebook account?. “Millions of people have invested billions of collective hours building what scholars call a networked life narrative, in which people ‘co-construct’ their social identities through their interactions with one another. Perhaps you’ve never thought about how archiving the small moments of your life would eventually amass into a large narrative of yourself. Or how interactions from your family, friends, colleagues and strangers would create meaningful dimensions of that story.”
GeekWire: Seattle startup Lalo is latest ‘death tech’ innovator, with an app to share and collect stories and more. “Currently operating as a small, private beta, Lalo is an app that facilitates the collection of digital content such as images, video, voice, text and more. Away from the noise and common pitfalls of traditional social media platforms, groups are intentionally kept small to foster increased trust and privacy. Imagine family members gathering to collect the best recipes in one space or share images that might have been lost to an unseen photo album.”
Psychology Today: How Social Media Can Influence Your Memories. “A new study published in the journal Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking has found that sharing your personal memories on social media may have an added benefit of helping you remember those moments.”
Monash University: New study finds ancient Australian Aboriginal memory tool superior to “memory palace” learning among medical students. “The researchers found that the students who used the Aboriginal technique for remembering – ie a narrative plus locations from around the campus – were almost three times more likely to correctly remember the entire list than they were prior to training (odds ratio – 2.8). The students using the memory palace technique were about twice as likely to get a perfect score after training (2.1), while the control group improved by about 50% (1.5) over their pre-training performance.”
The Conversation: Social media ‘likes’ change the way we feel about our memories – new research. “Memories are often considered very personal and private. Yet, in the past few years, people have got used to notifications from social media or phone galleries telling them they have a ‘memory’. These repackaged versions of the past affect not just what we remember but also the attachments we have with those memories. In a new study, we found social media has the potential to change how people feel about their memories.”
Simon Fraser University: Musical memories refreshed: Olo Radio gives Last FM users a new way to interact with their music-streaming history. “Imagine accessing an archive of all the songs you’ve ever listened to—organized by the time of day, day of the year, or time of your life that you listened to them. With Olo Radio, a device designed by School of Interactive Arts and Technology professor William Odom and collaborator Tijs Duel, you can do just that. Olo Radio links to a user’s Last.fm account and uses simple metadata, including the time and date a song was played, to organize a personal music archive and make it accessible in a new way.”
Hypebeast: Instagram Launches “On This Day” Function to Bring Back Your Favorite Memories. “If you’re a fan of Throwback Thursdays, you’ll love what Instagram has just implemented. Much like its Facebook counterpart, the mobile social platform will now suggest old memories from your feed through a new function called ‘On This Day,’ which comes as part of the new Create mode Instagram is pushing out.”
BBC: Fake news is ‘reinforced by false memories’. “A study into false memories highlights the risks of ‘fake news’ spreading via social media. Volunteers were shown fabricated news reports in the week before Ireland’s 2018 abortion law referendum. Nearly half of them subsequently claimed to have had prior memories of at least one of the made-up events detailed.”
Wired: The Rise and Fall of Facebook’s Memory Economy . “Facebook’s Memories feature—where it shows you pictures and posts from a day in the recent or far-gone past—used to be my favorite thing about the platform. I mean, I have posted some hilarious things that my son said when he was little, and that time I went on a reporting trip to Area 51 was seriously cool. Heck, I’ve reposted it three years in a row. Now, though, I think Memories is the platform’s most cynical element. It’s a cheap ploy to keep us creating new posts, keep us interested, at a time when our interest is starting to drift away.”
HeraldReview: Through Apps And Workshops Museums Help Better The Lives Of Americans Living With Dementia. “On Sept. 24, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) will launch the U.S. version of the award-winning ‘House of Memories’ dementia awareness program, originally developed in the U.K. by National Museums Liverpool to provide person-centered care for people to live well with dementia. The program offers training workshops, resources and activities, including the ‘My House of Memories’ app, the first of its kind in the world. The app features more than 100 interactive pages of MNHS collection items, which can help those living with dementia draw on memories to create personal connections with family, friends and caregivers.”
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