To tweet and to immediately forget

There used to be a saying to the effect that “today’s news stories are tomorrow’s fish and chip wrapper”. It’s meant to indicate the ephemeral nature of “news” and how within a day (or so) big news stories can fade away. However, this is an archaic aphorism these days on two accounts; first, fish and chips are no longer wrapped in newspaper and second, people don’t usually consume much of their news from newspapers. These days people spend most of their time on social media but according to a new study what they put onto social media might be even more ephemeral.

The group that had the option to retweet gave twice as many incorrect answers as the other group and also showed poor comprehension of what they had read.

The study was done in China where the subjects were using Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter. The subjects were put into two groups and were presented with messages/Tweets. After reading each message subjects in one group were given the option to either retweet it or just leave it on go on to the next message. The other group was not given the option to retweet but were only given the option of moving on to the next message.

The subjects were all then given a test that measured how much of the content of the series of messages they could retain.

The results showed that the group that had the option to retweet gave twice as many incorrect answers as the other group and also showed poor comprehension of what they had read. The researchers theorised that the retweeters are suffering from cognitive overload as making a choice of whether to share or not consumes cognitive resources and that interferes with the subsequent task.

It seems that the more things change, the more they stay the same and the retweets of this minute are just the fish and chip wrappers of your mind in the next minute.