We not only stand on the shoulders of giants but also work alongside them, destroying and collaborating, guided and guiding. And how can I act to make these days memorable, if not in my mind, then in my bones, in all that follows?
And I remembered a part of me that had been boxed up and filed away for a long, long time. “A reminder of my capacity for feeling”: that’s what I experienced. And it’s what I wish for you, too.
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”
“The process of remembering memories rewrites them, revises them, and this ability to re-envision ourselves is a central part of the creation of seemingly stable life narratives that allow for growth and change.” “As the work of memory keeping is offshored, Instagram by Instagram, to social media companies and cloud storage, we are giving up the work of remembering ourselves for the convenience of being reminded.” “McAdam’s life narrative is made up not so much of memories as it is by the active, personal, and performative act of remembering. The inputs into Facebook or Timehop are not bits of narrative. A Facebook Memory cannot be a narrative fragment because it is static. But to state the obvious, it is also not a memory: It is a socially contextualized performative expression. Facebook’s re-presentation of these “memories” strips them of context, recategorizing them as “events” or “moments.” They are both separate from their own context in time and, as memory objects, unavailable for the remembering and rewriting that would be necessary to interpolate them into a coherent personal narrative.” “These physical evocations age, and their value and veracity as objects of testimony ages with them and us. They date, they fade, they display their distance from the events they are connected to and their distance from us. Digital memory objects, on the other hand, although they might abruptly obsolesce, do not age in the same way. They remain flatly, shinily omni-accessible, represented to us cleanly both in the everlasting ret-conned context of their creation and consumption. The user interface of Facebook doesn’t time-machine itself to the design it had when you composed whatever memory it is showing you from 10 years ago. In the visual context presented, you could have written it yesterday.” “‘Inside Google Maps,’ she writes, ‘I live with you, and I live without you.’” “if living in one present moment is good, living in endlessly arrested presents must be even better. A continual living in the present means there is no space for reflection, for coherence-building. There is just the continual, lepidoptery-like collection of “moments.” Memories turned into mere mementos. Remembering turns into reminding.”
