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Facebook Banter More Memorable Than Lines From Recent Books
sciencehabit writes "Scientists have found that, when it comes to mental recall, people are far more likely to remember the text of idle chitchat on social media platforms like Facebook than the carefully crafted sentences of books. The team gathered 200 Facebook posts from the accounts of undergraduate research assistants, such as 'Bc sometimes it makes me wonder' and 'The library is a place to study, not to talk on your phone.' They also randomly selected 200 sentences from recently published books, gathered from free text on Amazon.com. Sentences included, 'Underneath the mass of facial hair beamed a large smile,' and 'Even honor had its limits.' Facebook posts were one-and-a-half times as memorable as the book sentences (abstract). The researchers speculate that effortless chatter is better than well-crafted sentences at tapping into our minds' basic language capacities — because human brains evolved to prioritize and remember unfiltered information from social interaction."
people are far more likely to remember the text of idle chitchat on social media platforms
Not which is more "likely" but what is the average retention time?
Maybe that 1.5 difference is between retaining it for 2 days and 3 days?
I used to be a voracious reader, anything really fiction/non-fiction/blahh
But it's like I hit a quota one day and shifted to reading nothing but stuff online, I'm finding my television and film viewing is also shifting away to YouTube or videos on my computer. Why watch the whole "Daily Show" when I can see all the best bits (in gif form?)
Is it the narcissistic joy of interacting with an audience that generates tons of new content EVERY DAY that draws me in or something else?
Or is it just me having a short attention span?
What is it?
Than latest Oscar winner. Good research. Keep it comin....
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Maybe most recently published books are lamer than idle chitchat on Facebook?
How about a similar study using sentences from acknowledged classics? "To be or not to be, that is the Question", I imagine would be quite memorable, although it might be more fair to choose less well known passages.
I guess is easy for me to say, since with the exception of Terry Prachett I really only read old stuff available under public free licenses.
More likely, the Facebook posts were written to be standalone sentences, and were thus more comprehensible than a sentence taken out of context from a large book. Human have been shown to be much better at memorizing things which they understand and can make associations with than things they don't understand.
Some books have very memorable prose. Most books however strive to tell a good story. (Some books manage to do both. Standard plug for Lois McMaster Bujold here.)
For most books when you get involved in the story you're focused on what's happening in the story, not the exact prose that's used to tell that story. On Facebook you're only going to remember a post if something particularly dramatic happen (which for most people happens fairly rarely) or if they make a memorable quip. And most Facebook posts, especially those that get repeated and spread, tend towards the memorable quip end of the spectrum.
If you asked people to give a general outline of what happened in the book they read a week ago compared to what was going on in all their friends' lives as posted on Facebook a week ago the results would probably be much more balanced.
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They used recently published books.
Probably more people can remember the really good quotes from Shakespere than lines from modern books, too. Doesn't mean Shakespere wrote his stuff on Facebook.
Second, lines aren't material in works of fiction. All forms of art are about conveying ideas (intellectual, emotional, doesn't matter). Facebook may be great at conveying words, but that doesn't mean it is useful at conveying ideas. The sheer number of flamewars on the Internet would suggest it is an extremely poor medium for transmitting thoughts and feelings. On the other hand, I would be willing to bet that you can remember more of what a book/movie was about, the contexts, the subplots, etc, if you specifically do NOT focus on trying to remember the words.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
There's another force working on the opposite direction that favours casual banter written by others: published text is often heavily massaged to use idiomatic language that fits in familiar patterns. The lack of novelty in the writing and the lack of effort required to read it makes it stick out less. As a general rule, you'll remember things better when you spend more effort in understanding them.
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maybe it just the phrases they used. That are odd or not relevant. The examples in this news shows exactly that.
put a line like "OMG does my boss suck! happy hour LOL!!!" on facebook between two cute cat pictures, and it's going to be remembered longer than "Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him well." more fun and less likely to be a test afterwards. and most likely, your boss has also been on your case and you have not been fearful of insane kings with big-ass swords.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
From the synopsis, did the researchers even verify that the study participants had in fact read those recent books. Scientifically speaking, it's probably tough to recall something you've never read. -Just sayin'
Which has more power: the hammer, or the anvil?
This clearly demonstrates the so-called scientists' inability to properly select unbiased parameters for their study. A sentence in a book comes with a lot of necessary and significant context. Whereas the drivel on Facebook and Twitter has virtually no context what-so-ever except for the immediately preceding sentence of drivel. They have performed an expensive study comparing apples and oranges and simply concluded that apples aren't orange in color.
They're still books. These sentences are likely to feel obscure when ripped out of context. Casual communication is much choppier, the FB postings probably aren't bleeding on their sides.
Ezekiel 23:20
So we have list A, made up of the day-to-day commentary of college undergraduates. Then we have list B, made up of random snippets of contemporary popular literature. The context for both lists are stripped away, and then they are fed to college undergraduates to see which set is more resonant?
Why of course, this must have to do with some sort of innate cognitive affinity for poorly constructed sentences! What else could it be?!?!?!?! One thing I know for sure... the results of this research are going to be really hard for me to remember later on.
Those book lines have a much higher complexity/density! How did they manage to ignore something so blatantly obvious?!?
Either they let monkeys do studies now, or this was done deliberately by some grumpy old loser who needed it to be a certain result. If you know what I mean.
Sometimes I can't tell the two apart anymore.
The language in which books are written is generally intended to form an overall narrative. It'd be exhausting and confusing to read an entire book of pithy one-liners. It's hardly a shock that lines chosen at random fail to stick in the mind. That doesn't mean that books cannot have memorable sentences in them, just that sentences chosen utterly at random are unlikely to be on that list.
The Facebook posts were written either to be a standalone sentence, or part of a small paragraph, while the sentences from the books were extracted from a much larger overall work. Of course "Omg, hang up your cell phone and put on your shirt!" is going to be more memorable than "She walked in the door."
I would say that this shows that people's priority filters work pretty well.
As popular as it is to put down chit-chat, the truth is that words spoken by real people that you actually interact with about things that actually happen are astoundingly more important for one to remember than well crafted prose from characters who never existed.
This goes to the core of why learning structured information is often so difficult. The brain's filters have not been trained to treat the information as important so it gets discarded along with all the other rubbish.
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You're more likely to recently have said, read, written, or heard the same words that were in the Facebook postings than the sentences from novels.
Complete information:
'The library is a place to study, not to talk on your phone.'
Incomplete information:
'Underneath the mass of facial hair beamed a large smile,' and 'Even honor had its limits.' What face? Who was it? Santa? What limits are there to honor? What task did honor just require of someone? Who was it?
When sentences start inviting questions like these, no wonder no one remembers them word for word.
People don't read popular literature... I think this has more to do with the fact so many people don't actually read any more than with Facebook being memorable.
Also, because apparently this still needs to be said:
Correlation != Causation
They picked the wrong type of quotes for comparison.
Yippe-ki-yay Motherf@(#€&!
Meesa called Jar Jar Binks.
So maybe a lot of that care tsken by writers is wasted. If the crap that comes out of peoples' mouths is what our brains want to hea, well...
It used to be that the average American needed TV shows at the third grade level of education. Now it is a bit lower than that. But books require a greater level of education. I can easily believe that most Americans not only can not recall lines from books but also never understand them to begin with and that is if by dumb luck they actually managed to open a real book. This is the duh generation.
They also pointed out that the lines in the book are deliberately constructed for impact. Facebook is full of a bunch of disposable bon mots.
I don't think this is all that interesting of a discovery, one liners are always easy to remember, and frequently become redeployed out of context and occasionally in direct opposition to their intent.
Which is why Dubya is so very quotable.
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
until you've examined both things being compared and understand why they are what they are.
I've just completed my third novel, my first which I feel is good enough to shop to agents and editors. I've spent considerable time testing my manuscripts and scenes by sharing them with other writers and -- even more importantly -- critiquing their manuscripts. The vast majority of unpublished manuscripts are every bit as tedious you can imagine. Now picture yourself pouring over those in minute detail, thinking about them as hard as you possibly can. You'd begin to see that most faults in writing involve mishandling, misdirecting, or abusing readers' attention.
Suppose you were reading a hundred thousand word novel -- roughly three hundred pages in paperback, and *every single sentence* was written in a way to calculated to grab you by the collar and make you remember. It would be exhausting; I'd be surprised if you made it more than a couple of pages into the story.
The vast majority of sentences in a well-written novel are meant to transfer information into your consciousness without ever being noticed. They're utility sentences -- the semantic delivery vans of literature -- and when they do their work the action of the novel flows efficiently, without hindrance. Some of my fellow authors refer to this quality where reader attention moves unimpeded through a story as "lightness".
Fashions vary with generation, of course. Victorian writers wrote many more ornate, dense, complicated sentences than modern ones do. And for some writers conspicuous prose style is the main pleasure. But even a celebrated purple prose writer like EE Doc Smith wrote mostly utility sentences, reserving the "coruscant displays of pyrotechnic splendor" for high points in the story.
Now there are all kinds of unflattering but true things you can say about most of what gets published, but "hard to read" isn't one of them. It shouldn't be surprising that a random sampling of sentences turns up very few memorable ones, any more than a random sampling of vehicles on the highway turns up more delivery vans and Toyota Corollas than Ferraris.
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Pretty much. Awkward, unpolished language sticks in your mind. In fact, a lot of memes are that way.
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Lollercoaster.
could be situational yes. But I think it's more that (a) the so-called (not by me!) social web at least are avatars of real people, very interesting whether by choice or evolution; (b) those are INTERACTIONS books are not. My self, I think people were built to ACT, and that our prime acts involve either our relations with others or the things we do together if not both. Me, I remember BOOKS. Not the sentences, but the world-situational images they evoke. But surely not the sentences lol. Facts are for sweeping out the door once the pattern is apprehended imho. Often the social web evokes images, at least of feeling/situations being represented to me by others. In other words, stuff whether I actually react (with action) or not, hits the buttons etc.
"We like our own nonsense and our friends' nonsense more than external nonsense."
Who would have thought?
http://science.howstuffworks.com/innovation/scientific-experiments/10-obvious-research-discoveries.htm
Table-ized A.I.
Social media will essentially feed short messages with a punch line. A carefully built up story will expand on themes and provide nuances and background.
What's the bleeding point in comparing the two? It's so friggin obvious that both styles will differ. The effort put into the "research" should have better been put towards creating "world peace". Even "cleaning the appartement" is more sensible than this.
I hadn't the slightest objection to his spending his time planning massacres for the bourgeoisie... (P.G. Wodehouse)
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"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
You can remember things written better if it was written in way you write/speak.
Exactly. Linguists proved this ages ago. It's a shame the guys in this study didn't think to ask someone working in the field -- it would have saved them a lot of time and effort.
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There's another force working on the opposite direction that favours casual banter written by others: published text is often heavily massaged to use idiomatic language that fits in familiar patterns. The lack of novelty in the writing and the lack of effort required to read it makes it stick out less. As a general rule, you'll remember things better when you spend more effort in understanding them.
Those patterns may be common, but they're not necessarily more "familiar" than unaltered casual language, because unaltered language is what we use on a day-to-day basis. In written form we try to avoid constructions like "John-and-Mary's daughter" where the apostrophe-S denotes possession for both John and Mary, but that's how we speak. Also "There's three things I hate" as opposed to "There are three..." etc.
Casual speech is very familiar indeed, much more so than written speech.
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because human brains evolved to prioritize and remember unfiltered information from social interaction."
So essentially we are evolving to become machines. Organic creatures with synthetic parts, or is it the other way around. I once discussed with someone the possibility of the origins of the universe being of a construct a program, synthetically built. That our creators are perhaps a marriage of synthetic and organic materials and we are just copies of the original beings. Written code that has evolved, because all of nature when broken down to there very essence is very structured the atoms, molecules, and DNA that comprises us all. However, outwardly humans can be compared to a AI program gone out of control at times. At the very least the Titans that we use to calculate different variables through time, space ETC......can essentially calculate all these possibilities, why wouldn't a more advance synthetic race of beings?
I'm talking about a slightly higher level of conversation structure. The features you're describing are certainly significant in how they affect spoken language (modern French is very drastically different from written French, BTW; it's very weird), but are less likely to predominate in written text like Facebook posts. This is especially the case for other samples studied by the researchers, like comments left on CNN articles. Professionally-written text is just generally well-organized; concepts and events are introduced in an efficient manner, using consistent and correct word choice. Even if the sentence structure is more familiar, when people blunder through recounting an event, we have to do more work to reconstruct what they're saying. Professional writing is composed with the benefit of hindsight and more thoughtful analysis.
...however, the researchers believe that people are just natural gossips. With that in mind, it could easily be about the density of opinions and moods in the text that makes the snippets easier to remember; the emotions of the author provide another anchor to build an associative memory around.
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I'm talking about a slightly higher level of conversation structure. The features you're describing are certainly significant in how they affect spoken language (modern French is very drastically different from written French, BTW; it's very weird), but are less likely to predominate in written text like Facebook posts. This is especially the case for other samples studied by the researchers, like comments left on CNN articles. Professionally-written text is just generally well-organized; concepts and events are introduced in an efficient manner, using consistent and correct word choice. Even if the sentence structure is more familiar, when people blunder through recounting an event, we have to do more work to reconstruct what they're saying. Professional writing is composed with the benefit of hindsight and more thoughtful analysis.
...however, the researchers believe that people are just natural gossips. With that in mind, it could easily be about the density of opinions and moods in the text that makes the snippets easier to remember; the emotions of the author provide another anchor to build an associative memory around.
I think my choice of an extreme example has diverted the conversation. Personally, I feel that spontaneous written text is something of a "happy medium" between school-taught rules and natural patterns -- a blend of the natural (favouring things like "can I" over school-book "may I") with a few of the simple that make written text clearer in the absence of spoken intonation.
So I'm not saying it's 100% spoken English in written form, just that it's more like spoken English.
Got them moderator blues I blieve I walk out the do', With these mod-points I been gettin', I 'most never post no mo'