make people less thoughtful about and engaged in what they're doing because they are focused on the recording process, Schwartz said.
Moreover, if these documented memories are available to others, people may actually do things differently.
"If we have experiences with an eye toward the expectation that in the next five minutes, we're going to tweet them, we may choose difference experiences to have, ones that we can talk about rather than ones we have an interest in," he said.
Similarly, a 1993 study led by researchers at the University of Virginia found that undergraduate students who were asked to think about their reasons for choosing posters chose differently and reported less satisfaction than those who did not have to justify their choices.
Since memories are not perfectly accurate depictions of situations and get fuzzier over time, they may be problematic in situations such as being a witness at a trial, Schwartz said. But there are also benefits to this fuzziness: It helps people come up with coherent narratives about what their lives are about, he said.
Being able to compress a lot of experiences and summarize them well is part of the very nature of human intelligence, said Douglas Hofstadter, professor of cognitive science at Indiana University, Bloomington, and author of "Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid."
"It's about finding the essence of things," he said. "It's not about restoring everything. It's about reducing things in complexity until they're manageable and understandable."
Hofstadter did keep a diary from age 19 to 25 and once in a while will go back and read a hundred handwritten pages. But each entry is short and does not capture life decades ago in real-time; it just sums it up.
"Are you likely to spend a week of your life when you're 60 looking at your life when you're 20? No," he said.