Forgetting is part of how we cope with the monotony of everyday life and how we look at problems in new ways. …my feeling is that the hardware you physically interact with, the things you touch every day, are worth the extra cost. We think it’s our job to align everyone’s flow state with their personal mission at the company.
But I think we need to make a conscious effort to realize: every time is different. Even if you put the same effort in and make the same decisions, the world, the people in it, and you, have all changed. What worked before, might not work now. The idea that failed before, well — maybe its day has come.
Have you ever met someone with a unique first name, and then all of a sudden you hear the name everywhere you turn? That's the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon at work. How did it get that handle?
Left to its own devices, the human brain resorts to one of its most emblematic tricks, maybe one that helped make us human in the first place. It time-travels. The whole sequence is a master class in temporal gymnastics. The PET scanner allowed us to appreciate, for the first time, just how complex this kind of cognitive time travel actually is. “Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.” Amos Tversky once joked that where probability is concerned, humans have three default settings: “gonna happen,” “not gonna happen” and “maybe.” We are brilliant at floating imagined scenarios and evaluating how they might make us feel, were they to happen. But distinguishing between a 20 percent chance of something happening and a 40 percent chance doesn’t come naturally to us. The Homo prospectus theory suggests that, if anything, we need to carve out time in our schedule — and perhaps even in our schools — to let minds drift.
Instead, I think what’s strange is the massive capacity we now have for holding onto our pasts. But it also means that we carry more and more of our past selves with us, quite literally, in our laptop bags.
In Memory of my Grandmother: “Educate Your Girls, Cherish Your Good Memories”
For the rest of her life, my grandmother told this story to pretty much everyone she met. When I visited her at the assisted living facility for the next decade—where she loved living as it gave her independence—even the janitors would greet me as the granddaughter who had gone to the United States to get a doctorate, and whose committee had applauded my grandmother. She told this story to people she sat next to in the ferry; she told this to anyone who asked her about her life.
I recently stumbled upon this tweet from Aaron Lewis: “what if old tweets were displayed with the profile pic you had at the time of posting. a way to differentiate between past and present selves.” I’m going to set aside for now an obviously and integrally related matter: to what degree should our present self be held responsible for the utterances of an older iteration of the self that resurface through the operations of our new memory machines? What I’m reading into Lewis’s proposal then is an impulse, not at all unwarranted, to reassert a measure of agency over the operations of digitally mediated memory. Yes, that was me as I was, but that is no longer me as I now am, and this critical difference was implicit in the evolution of my physical appearance, which signaled as much to all who saw me. No such signals are available to the self as it exists online.
But as a result, I am remembering much of my life through the algorithmic frameworks of these third-party companies. Consequently, we view photographs not merely as relatively rare artifacts capturing particularly significant moments but as prosthetic extensions of ourselves and our interior lives. When algorithms intervene in how and when we interact with our photographs, they secure a deeply emotional inroad to our identity-forming practices. These images and the way they are algorithmically organized don’t merely remind us of the past; they help shape how we think of ourselves in the present and how we might think to document our lives and articulate ourselves in the future. — making us audiences of ourselves as the algorithms piece together our “best” stories for us. But “Memories” features rewire relationships in such a way that makes commercial platforms indispensable mediators. memories become susceptible to being evaluated according to performance metrics. we must ask what memories are left on the outskirts. What experiences are illegible to or unvalued by a commercial system? What does it mean for our subjectivities at large that we are all building our memories around same scaffolding? Over four decades ago, Susan Sontag posited that photography enables “an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted.” As a multiplier of photography’s influence, algorithmically fueled “Memories” features bring us deeper into a supercharged aesthetic consumerism that shapes our personal narratives along the lines of influencer culture.
“What if birthdays were a time of sharing the impact the person has had on you, or noticing changes in them they might not be aware of themselves.”
“So since it's my birthday, please answer one of these prompts: “What's your favorite memory of me?” “What an impact I've had on you that you haven't shared with me?” “What's the biggest change you've seen in me since you first met me (or in the last year)?””
“the function of memory is not to document the past (as always the same, always available for rote recall) but to produce the past in the present moment”
