🧠 Is The Internet Changing Our Memory?

Our sense of time is changing significantly!

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
And Amanda gam Nation I put. I saw something the
other day that I put on my Instagram, and my
children and Digital Jenna saw it and thought, oh, mum's
in on the joke. This is funny. I wasn't. I'm
going to out myself as an idiot. I saw a picture,
remember the Turkish guy at the Olympics who just casually
turned up, had his hand in his pocket, pretty much

(00:22):
put down a smoke. Bang got gold? Remember that?

Speaker 2 (00:25):
So you just showed up.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
It just showed up, whatevers, I'll get gold. I saw
that with above it it says this was five years ago.
Feel old? Yet I posted that and I put underneath it.
The news cycle moves fast. It sounds like because there's
a trope at the moment where it's like Will Smith

(00:47):
hits Chris Rock at the Oscars twenty seven years ago.
Today it's all a joke. The timelines. It's just a
joke about how our timelines are all weird. But I
fell for that. And even behind it's got Paris twenty
twenty four in the picture. Yeah yeah, And I said
to you, I thought you were joking. No, I showed
you the pictures and I said, can you believe this

(01:07):
is five years ago. So it looks like I'm in
on this joke, this Instagram joke.

Speaker 2 (01:12):
Everyone knowing you're a genius.

Speaker 1 (01:13):
I'm a complete idiot. But it does show you how
quickly the news cycle does move that your perception of time.
And I think COVID had a lot to do with that.
That there's years that we've just lost and have sped
up and slowed down at the same time.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
Something I completely forgot about during my holidays and I've
had a bit of a social medium. I just didn't
scroll through my phone as much. But one of the
things that popped up Ozzie Osborne dead at the age
of seventy six. This happened on my Instagram a week
ago and I looked at it, so you saw that
I saw it. I remember at the time googling is
Ossie still with us? That's terrible, and sure enough he was.

(01:48):
And it was only when Kelly Osborne, his daughter, put
out a post saying this, who does this? Who does this?
I'd say this that was a bot that put that out,
because now we've got a situation where bots are fighting
with bots and kids, the young kids Geny Rise Clan.
They put out these s posts, so they make up
stuff and they just put it up. There are classic
example this of Scott Morris and Ingodeen macis thing that

(02:10):
never happened. So the guy has come out and said
I was just taking the piss and everyone ran with it.
But now people firmly believe that that actually happened. It's
like the Steve Erwin effect. What's that people believe that
they've seen the video of Steve Irwin meeting his demise
with the stingray that doesn't exist.

Speaker 1 (02:29):
Well, you know my friend Anita McGregor, wh's well.

Speaker 2 (02:31):
It exists, but it hasn't been.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Seen it. We've never seen it. Anita McGregor, my friend,
who is a forensic psychologist. One of her colleagues does
a lot of work on memory and for when you're
in the witness box. A lot of research goes into
whether memories are real or not. And they did an
experiment years ago where they said to somebody, do you
remember when you went up in a hot air balloon?
I said, no, I never did that, and then they

(02:56):
show them a photo from a childhood from their childhood
where they've docted it in a shot of them in
a hot air balloon, and then later on they say
do you remember the thing? They go, yeah, I remember
that holiday with the hot air balloon. We're so open
to suggestion of the visual, but these days it is
so hard because AI has made those visuals so confusing.
We see stuff every day that isn't real and we

(03:19):
don't know it. I'm watching the movie j of K.
This was the Oliver Stone film. How many years ago
was that? Thirty years something like that, and they showed
some footage of an autopsy situation with him on the table,
And at the time Harley and I were talking about
this and saying, you can't tell if it's documentary footage
or if it's a movie footage, and how confusing it

(03:41):
is because once you see it, you think you've seen
the actuality. But these days we're seeing pictures where as
we said, yesterday Donald Trump is singing at the Oscars,
these we believe this stuff, that imagery he's put out
of Barack Obama being arrested. We see the images and
we think it's real, and we go some of go,
how can you fall for that? But as human beings,

(04:03):
how can we not?

Speaker 2 (04:04):
This is the other thing with bots arguing with bots
on the Internet. So you put up a post, particularly
the Trump stuff. I've noticed there's bots arguing with bots,
and then humans get involved. But they've just got two
different opinions of these bots. But people join in on the.

Speaker 1 (04:18):
They do because it's all about leaning. You're going to
lean in when you're anxious, when you're frightened, when you're scared.
So the bots are generating that fear and we lean in.

Speaker 2 (04:27):
That's exactly what you do.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Oh it's exhausting, isn't it exhaust Meanwhile, I look like
an idiot on Instagram, thanks very much.

Speaker 2 (04:33):
And there was no way I involved.

Speaker 1 (04:35):
Why I can't blame anyone