Memory online: introduction to the special issue

Abstract

This special issue brings together the scholarship that advances our knowledge on remembering in the age of the Internet and social media. The studies reported in the ten articles address diverse topics in three broad areas prominent in current research: offloading memory and the associated costs, benefits, and boundary conditions, autobiographical memory online, and false memory in a misinformation age. They employ innovative and rigorous methodological approaches that are ecologically valid in the online context. Their findings reveal complex and dynamic characteristics of human memory in a digitally mediated world that shapes our learning, our sense of self, and our beliefs and decision making. Collectively, the studies provide rich theoretical insights into the workings and functions of memory. This special issue ushers in a new era of research on memory in the age of the Internet and social media.