Mick Champayne | Your cloudy memories 15.05.2020
As we rely more and more on our digital devices to store and remember things for us, we are subtly shifting how human memory works. We all have memories we’d like to change, keep, or even, perhaps, edit, embellish, or erase, but in the future, could that be a reality?
Some people argue there is no such thing as a photographic memory. Scientifically
Eventually the internet happened, and my photography migrated online. First I started on Flickr, a photo-sharing platform where I learned more about technique and framing. Then I went to college, which meant a blur of party pictures on Facebook. Now I’m almost exclusively on Instagram, where I challenge myself to create fun and engaging stories with my photos.
Pics or it didn’t happen
Ultimately, for me and a lot of people, pictures serve as a form of “external memory storage.” One study found that
It’s not much of a leap to see our relationship with photography is closely linked to the rise of the smartphone and social media, making us a much more visual culture. In 2020, over
By now we’ve all been on the internet long enough that our “memories” are getting served back up to us daily. Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Timehop send us down into rabbit holes of old statuses, old photos, and old friends.
Pictures have paradoxically become both ephemeral and permanent. It’s so easy now to snap a photo and upload it, and features like Instagram Stories that have been designed to be fleeting are technically preserved indefinitely in Facebook’s cloud. And by now we’ve all been on the internet long enough that our “memories” are getting served back up to us daily. Social platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Timehop send us down into rabbit holes of old statuses, old photos, and old friends. New product services like
Although all of these products and services indulge us in our human penchant for nostalgia, some memories are not always things we want to revisit. Features like
Memory already exists. Do you want to replace it?
We all have memories we’d like to change, keep, or even, perhaps, edit, embellish, or erase. Two recent research studies raise this provocative prospect.
First, neuroscientists at the
The
Eternal backup
While we’re still a long way off from human-memory editing, that doesn’t mean we can rewrite history. In Amy Webb’s
“After a decade of posting photos, videos and written messages on social media, it’s now clear that our recent histories will persist far into the future,” Webb writes in her report. “A centerpiece of the European Union’s landmark internet laws, the ‘right to be forgotten,’ emerged as a standard intended to force search engines to delete links to personal information if it wasn’t in the public interest. But in 2019, the European Court of Justice ruled in Google’s favor, making it much harder for people to request that negative, private or misleading information about them is removed from internet searches. A Google search team member put it more bluntly: ‘We’re not a truth engine.’”
In either case, when it comes to manipulating memory—either personal or our collective one—the bigger picture is perhaps the value of our memories. If our actions, our personalities, our very notions of self are based on the experiences we have had and on the memories we have collected, then to delete them would be similar to losing our phones—would we lose ourselves?
see also
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