Our memories 'like' Facebook too

Do you sometimes struggle to remember what you read on page 2 of a polished report despite having only made it as far as page 4? Yet you can still remember that Jane Smith, who you last saw with her school tie knotted around her head celebrating the end of fifth year, was going out for a curry on Friday night – a fact you read on her Facebook post?

According to a recent piece of academic research (from psychologists at the University of Warwick no less), people seem to find it easier to remember text posted on social media sites than sentences from books or photographs of faces. Wired reports that Laura Mickes and her team took 200 Facebook status updates, stripped them of their context, and showed them to 32 participants alongside other decontextualised lines from 200 different fiction and nonfiction books. The participants were shown the lines on a screen, briefly, and given the choice of saying whether it had been repeated from earlier in the experiment or not.

The results found that, across the board, people were one and a half times as likely to remember a Facebook post as a line from a book — and, when a similar experiment was carried out with faces instead of the lines from novels, it showed that people were two and a half times as likely to remember the Facebook posts over the faces.

According to Mickes, the gaps in performance seen are of the same scale as the differences between amnesiacs and individuals with healthy memories.

18 months ago, I sat firmly in the sceptical camp on the subject of consulting firms using Facebook – to the extent that I quickly brushed over this channel in a seminar Source ran on creating and disseminating thought leadership through social and digital media. However, since then, I’ve shifted quite a way – driven to a large extent by how my personal use of Facebook has changed. Bored (and slightly intimidated) by ‘Eliot scored top marks in his violin exam’ updates, I’ve filtered out most of these creating space for updates from organisations pushing interesting content my way. Combine this with an iPad and I find myself skimming lots of consulting thought leadership in five or ten minute slots here and there.

And I can’t believe I’m alone. Add this experience to the evidence about how our memories like Facebook too, and the arguments for consulting firms to invest in social media become ever stronger.