The Persistence of Memory

"Hey, remember the time we took all the apples from your apple tree in your backyard and lined them up across the road to see how people in cars would react? Most of them ended up running the apples over after hesitating and trying to first navigate around them. Remember the time we made a dramatic story podcast in middle school back before podcasts were a thing? We used an old audio recorder we found, and our story featured Arnold Schwarzenegger and epic gun battle scenes. Remember when we played Neopets together, discovered Jelly World, and didn't know what the stock exchange was?"

I love talking to my childhood friends and reminiscing about what we were up to back in elementary and middle school. Most of us have fuzzy memories of what transpired back then, but if someone asks a "Hey remember when" question, chances are, the memory will come flooding back, salient for the next retrieval. All of us have selective memories, and the ones that stand out to us the most are the most noteworthy or the funniest. Our memories can range from how heavy our sibling weighed as a newborn (very), to what happened when 9/11 transpired (I was watching Dragon Tales when my parents decided to change the channel to the 5 pm news). All of these things are important in shaping how we see the world, and in fact, shaping how we act in the future.

As a middle schooler, I was a prolific journaler. As a result, I have much stronger memories of the things I did in sixth grade and seventh grade - because I'll occasionally return to those journal entries and have a good laugh. I wrote about Chuck Norris jokes before I knew how misogynistic they were, and I wrote about being excited to watch Mythbusters after school. In 2008, I tried to assess if the world was really going to end in 2012. I described how left out and lonely I felt because I wasn't interested in the Twilight saga, High School Musical, or Hannah Montana like other girls at school. I suspect that my desire to fit in caused me to clam up and earn the reputation of a quiet kid for the next 10 years until I got to college.

I wonder what things are like now for kids growing up in this era. Everything that is posted on social media will exist on the Internet indefinitely, until someone decides to go back and remove it. Even if it is deleted by the original creator, there is a possibility that a vestige of it is stored in some company's server out in the Midwest, or even on your own device... VSauce illustrates this well in his video, "Where Do Deleted Files Go?" The world captured in physical photo albums with fraying corners seems to be a relic of a bygone time. No longer do we curate fifteen of our favorite photos for an album - we just take hundreds of pictures per month instead. The standard for documenting memories has changed.

Overdocumentation may not be the best practice if it keeps us from moving on from deaths, failed relationships, and other tragedies that are supposed to heal with time. Sometimes, the last thing I need is Facebook prompting me to look back at a memory that I don't want to think about. With my journals, at least I can choose when I return to them, and they're for my eyes only. And what happens when we concentrate too much on capturing everything special that happens in our lives? A research study conducted by NYU Professor Alixandra Barasch offers some answers - it states that "taking photos with the intention to share them on social media diminishes people's enjoyment of their experiences by increasing anxiety or self-presentational concern." The direct link to the actual academic paper is here.

Perhaps our sacrifice will preserve the moment, recording it objectively for others to see. But, sometimes the magic of human memory is that we enjoy it in the moment, and that it becomes subjective and mutable, evolving in our minds over time in relationship with our emotions and dreams.

To me, that really defines the Persistence of Memory, as illustrated by Salvador Dali in his famous ominous painting of melting clocks.

What about you? What are some things you remember from your childhood, and how have they shaped the way you function today? How do you feel about the role of technology in making memories easier to remember? Leave a comment below, and I would love to discuss!

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EDIT: October 4th, 2018
Just cleaned up the formatting of my sources and fixed some issues with HTML and display. Special shout-out to the person who messaged me because she couldn't view the content! As informal as this blog is, I'm moving towards citing dates of publication to keep it more reliable.

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Sources:
[1] Salvador Dali - The Persistence of Memory (1931).
[2] VSauce. "Where Do Deleted Files Go?" VSauce. July 20th, 2013. 
[3] "Taking Photos to Share on Social Media Reduces Enjoyment of Experiences, NYU Stern Study Finds." January 3rd, 2018.