Grapevine

Understanding autobiographical memory in the digital age

Just 100 years ago, most people had—at most—a few photos of themselves and their family. What a difference to today, when we can easily capture every important and unimportant moment—from our child's first step to a visit to a restaurant with friends to a holiday photo on the beach.

"One can have very different intuitions about how this increased density of recorded life episodes should be evaluated," explains Dr. Fabian Hutmacher, a researcher at the Chair of Psychology of Communication and New Media at Julius-Maximilians-Universität (JMU) Würzburg in Bavaria, Germany.

"Some people hope, for example, that we will be able to compensate for the weaknesses and to reduce the distortions of human memory in this way. Others are concerned that it will rather create new potential for surveillance and the undermining of our privacy."