It is a strange thing to have unlimited storage space. My new phone has 128gb, I don't know how many photos that is. At one point I think it was like 1000 songs. Nowadays phones and the internet have become a much more attractive and addicting place to store personal data than old ways, like friends community and art. We just have so much space, I guess thats why people take pictures of meals, and their kids and everything. I recently scrolled through my pictures and I had forgotten so many I have taken.
While this isn't that big of a deal some people write about it as being really strange. Transactive memory is something people have used for a long time. Its simplified with an example of pictures, when you have a picture of a scene you don't really need to remember it, because it is captured and written down. You mostly just have to remember where that picture is.
The internet though represents a much stranger place for transactive memory in that you don't even need to remember where the stored memory is. The internet has become the place with the memory but also the memory of the location. Like now my phone has as well.
I think the authors of this study don't necessarily say this is bad, but they do say its likely to change how humans think. A topic that has been touched on see
the shallows
.