RESUMEN Y CONCLUSION DE LOS DATOS

Although no literature disputes the methodology or results of Sparrow et al. and Wegner et al., there are those who have been critical of the interpretative structures used to draw conclusions. Bryce Huebner’s 2016 review of transactive memory, in which he also includes Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ extended mind thesis of 1998 and subsequent literature, draws out the theoretical factors involved in making claims that the Internet could be used as a site of memory or cognition. Huebner agrees that there is a “broad and expanding consensus that we often exploit the physical and social structure of our world when we expect that the information we need will be available when we look for it again” (49). However, Huebner argues that defining such activities as memory requires a specific attitude towards the

from John Sutton’s Philosophy and Memory Traces: Descartes to Connectionism,a history of philosophical accounts of memory, which argues that attitudes towards memory can be categorized into two camps: archival and constructive. Huebner sides with the constructivists and contends that memories represent “skeletal representations” (59) with which individuals flesh out with tacit and general knowledge at the time of remembering. Huebner draws on a body of research concerning false memories and eye-witness accounts, which address the frequency of false details that an individual supposedly remembers. Important to Huebner’s argument is that these false memories are often unrelated to the event and, therefore, have been constructed, rather than misremembered. The archival

approach, that sees memories as far more substantial and static, does not account for such evidence. Huebner argues that using a constructive approach

to transactive memory systems suggests that Wegner was wrong to claim that our frequent and pervasive use of Google searches and iPhones is sufficient to establish the existence of novel transactive memory systems. In these cases, the flow of information is unidirectional and exploitative. In these cases, we find a person who uses the informational resources and who encounters information that is structured in a way that makes it a target for exploitation. But exploitation is the paradigmatic relation that obtains between a person and the tools that she uses. (64)

A hypothesis that Huebner mentions in passing, but that is key later in this chapter, is that the increasing use of technology such as Google and smartphones might predispose individuals to model their approach to memory as “archival” as this “sits

comfortably with an everyday understanding about how digital computers work” (56- 57). Douwe Draaisma argues in Metaphors of Memory: A History of Ideas About the Mind that the line between metaphor and usage is significantly blurred:

artificial memories have not only supported, relived and occasionally replaced natural memory, but they have also shaped our views of remembering and forgetting. Over the centuries memory aids provided the terms and concepts with which we have reflected on our own memory. We have ‘impressions’, as if memory were a block of sealing-wax into which a signet ring is pressed. Some events are ‘etched’ on our memory, as if the memory itself were a surface for engraving upon. What we wish to retain we have to ‘imprint’; what we have forgotten is ‘erased’. We say of people with an exceptionally powerful visual recall […] that they have a ‘photographic memory’ [and therefore our] views of the operations of memory are fuelled by the procedures and

techniques we have invented for the preservation and reproduction of information. (3)

Draaisma argues that these metaphors are not simply used as models, which come and go, but structures that have caused historical effects on how we conceive of the mind and consequently the technologies and practices that continue shift such a definition.

Technologies are formed as consequences of social attitudes towards cognition and memory and, in turn, shape those attitudes as they become socially embedded. Huebner’s above contention is that the use of search engines and smartphones as memory prostheses has encouraged the perspective that these

activities replicate a model of the mind, that a hard drive memory measured in gigabytes might be comparable to human recollection. Such attentiveness to the potential biases of our own milieu is valuable. When Draaisma goes on to say that “The history of memory is a little like a tour of the depositories of a technology museum” (3), he is not arguing that similarities of expression exist, but that

technologies, metaphors and practices are deeply enmeshed. Arguing whether or not search engines represent a form of transactive memory depends on a particular definition of memory, which itself is based upon the attitudes and practices informed by ubiquitous computing. However, with this cautionary perspective in mind, I

contend that Huebner’s definition of search engine use as “unidirectional and

exploitative” (64) is not an accurate portrayal of how search engines function. A brief phenomenological example demonstrates that search engines can, in some