Essay on The Google Effect

Chelsea Midkiff
Christopher B. Nguyen
Modern Legacies
14 November 2012
The Google Effect
The invention of the internet has allowed the gathering of information to become as simple as pushing a button or clicking a mouse. From the ease of a comfy chair a inquirer can “Google” a recipe, a historical fact, or an actor's name. Researchers Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M. Wegner discovered a consequence of the tendency to web search for information in July 2011. The “Google Effect,” as they termed it, is the inclination for people to forget the information they know can be easily found on the internet, but remember the harder to find items. In a sense we use the internet as a handy book. We do not necessarily memorize everything in the book. Instead we remember where we can easily find it for future use.
The steps of one of Sparrow's research experiments consists of asking a variety of easy to difficult questions immediately followed by naming the colour of a computer term or general word. After asking a question that a participant did not know the answer to, the subjects naming the colour of a word responded more quickly when it was a computer term. “It seems that when we are faced with a gap in our knowledge, we are primed to turn to the computer to rectify the situation” (Sparrow 776).
In another experiment they gave participants previously unknown trivia knowledge and also information that might be remembered generally. All participants typed the information into the computer. Half were told the computer would save the information, the other half was told it would be erased. Half of these two “saved and erased” groups were given instructions to try to remember the information. After reading and typing the information down the participants were asked to write down all they could remember. The results showed that people did not remember the information as readily when they expected to have future access to it. Even being explicitly told to remember the information had little effect.
Another of Sparrow's experiments desired to discover whether people remember the location of the information over what the information is itself. The participants again read and typed out unusual trivia which was saved into generically named folders, e.g. Facts, Items, Info, Names, etc. The names of the folders were never pointed out to the participant. They were then asked to write down as much of the unusual trivia as they

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