Recalling a past interaction with a person is about more than "how do I know this person?". It's also about the emotional attachment that you have to the person. It's about whether they did you a favor and you owe them something or about whether you did them a favor and they owe you. Most of the time those relationships a very implicit and not easily grasped by notes.
There also a cost with not paying attention to another person when you meet them but being occupied with reading your notes, when the person would expect that you pay attention to them.
Absolutely, but I think that a lot of the time I would only need a small amount of information to trigger better recall. And sometimes there just isn't much to remember. For example, "this is ____, she was in your dance class yesterday" would have saved some momentary embarrassment at a party a month or so back.
At LW London last week, someone mentioned the possibility of a Google Glass app doing face recognition on people. If you've met someone before, it tells you their name, how you know them, etc. Someone else mentioned that this could reduce the social capital of people who are already good at this.
A third person said that something similar happened when Facebook started telling everyone when everyone else's birthday was. Previously he got points by making an effort to remember, but those points are no longer available.
Are there other social skills that technology has made obsolete? And the reverse question that it only just occured to me to ask, are there social skills that are only useful because of technology?
I'm not really sure what sorts of things I'm looking for here. "Ability to ask for directions" seems like one example, but it feels kind of noncentral to me, I don't know why. But I'm mostly just curious.