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.

BAD METAPHORS is an ongoing series that takes a critical look at the figures of speech that shuttle between technology and everyday life. In the gentle shrugging off of blame, “bandwidth” as metaphor becomes a useful distortion, since there is no regulatory body assigning us an emotional frequency spectrum. When we discuss feelings and relationships in terms of “bandwidth” we are treating them like megabits of information.