The Remembrance Epidemic (by Montrell Wiley)

For as long as social media has been around, people utilize its characteristic of leaving permanent marks on the internet. Unfortunately our minds do not have the capability of storing every single moment of our lives inside it, waiting to be picked out and reminisced over. This is where social media jumps in and allows for us to perform what Lee Humphreys describes as remembrancing of experiences, people, places, and events. While this tool basically eternizes our experiences, it also can come off as tedious when everyone is doing the same thing. So like everything, there are pros and cons to everyone having the power to post the parts of their lives they deem worthy of remembering. Overall, is remembrancing healthy for society?

The act of remembrancing can distort your memory of what you experienced as well as distort people's perception of what your life is like. As a personal example of how vacation photos can completely veer off people's view of your life, I will use my personal photos of when I visited California back in 2014 (is it too early to call this "back in the day"?) to look for colleges.

Before I went on this trip, I basically told everyone that I wasn't coming back and that I would be going to school out there. Once I made my presence known in LA by posting on Snapchat and Facebook and with my high hopes and confidence that eluded me from my real life situation of having to find an affordable apartment in downtown LA (an affordable..apartment...in downtown..LA...I can certainly laugh at this now) and also pay the high tuition costs of the schools I wanted to attend. After a week of being there with dead end after dead end, eventually my father and I decided to just make the best of the vacation and go sight seeing. I would then go home with my pride on the floor, so I did not publicly post about my failure to move to big town LA. A little less than a year later I would start attending Texas Lutheran University. Somehow, all of my posts of me at school at TLU got people thinking that I was actually in school in California! So every once in a while my friends from high school would ask me how California was because on social media it's as if I never left to people who aren't close to me. My boastful posts online caused people to have a false perception of my life which possibly affected other people who were told that I was in LA as well. My experience with this connects with Humphreys theory of remembrancing and shows how vacation posts can alter people's perception of us.

Not only does remembrancing alter other people's view on us, it also alters the way we remember our reality. Psychological scientist Linda Henkel suggests that there is no take away knowledge from only taking pictures. She is quoted as saying, "Despite the added time or attention required to angle the camera and adjust the lens so as to capture the best shot of the object in its entirety, the act of photographing the object appears to enable people to dismiss the object from memory, thereby relying on the external devise of the camera to 'remember' for them." (Emily Badger, How Instagram Alters Your Memory) We have to be able to analyze the details of each photo we take to remember the experiences we try to capture. Besides that, one could also argue that we could remember even more by simply living in the moment and analyzing all of the details of the life we experience everyday instead of analyzing pictures.

Remembrancing can have its benefits to the individual who performs it. It allows the user to be able to go back to days past or even years ago to get a fix of nostalgia. Going back to Henkel's theories, if one did not fully pay attention to their experience or their photos, they can go back and find details that they never realized before, giving them a new perspective of their past experiences. Most people would get annoyed by someone who posts a picture of every detail of their life, but that person is obviously benefiting somehow by posting so much. Society might want to turn away from someone who constantly performs remembrance online, but the individual benefits might just outweigh the societal issues. This is not saying that everyone who religiously posts is doing it to benefit themselves, or in fact to benefit anyone at all. Remembrancing can have many different meanings behind it. Henry Alford speaks on people who post their vacation photos, "But one can detect other motives, too: a tone-deaf attempt at self-branding, a neurotic attempt to thank your host, a need for constant scrutiny." (Henry Alford, The Tyranny of Other People's Vacation Photos) Alford explains that there is always an alternative motive to remembrancing, and that most of the time people's posts are usually to fulfill their narcissistic goals. This leaves us with a society where remembrancing is mainly used to fuel our egos, while slowly lowering everyone else's.