The Link Between Social Media and Our Memories

New week. New topics. New post. 

This week, we continued discussing Humphy's The Qualified Self as well as some other readings. Stemming off of a similar topic of social media diaries from a couple weeks ago...I wanna talk about what social media means for our memories.

Similar to diaries, scrapbooks, picture albums, etc. social media has become another way to share and document our lives for 2 main reasons:

remembrance and nostalgia.

However, there is one more little thing we have all come to do in between those two reasons. (But we'll get to that soon).

First, remembrance.

Humphrey talks about social media as a way that we can connect with ourselves and anticipate what we will want to look back on in the future. See, when we are in the present, taking pictures to save or post, we are assuming that we will want to look at them sometime in the future, and when that day comes, we will be looking back at our past selves (or past people we know) and appreciating the fact that at that time, we decided to record that piece of our lives. 

Whether it was a selfie, taken alone, in our room, at 2am, a video of 2 of our closest friends at dinner the week before, or a picture we took with a family member who passed away a few years prior, these are all things we wish to turn around and enjoy another day.

Take me, for example, I played softball in high school and was really close with my teammates so any practice, game, tournament, or outing, we would all record almost every second. As the years went on and I got closer to the end of my career (yes I do call the 10+ years of softball I played a career), I began recording more and taking more pictures because I knew there would come a day I would look forward to revisiting those days.

me playing catcher my Junior year

Those memories came to an abrupt stop my senior year due to Covid, but the pictures of my teammates, the compilation video of good times, the videos people snuck of my goofing off, and the videos of my plays in the field that I got the chance to post before it was over, are things that my friends and I talk about to this day when we all get back together. They let us go back and relive those moments in our lives.

While I did live in the moment with those girls, I did also want to make sure that I recorded those memories to keep forever - even the embarrassing ones.

This kind of leads me to my next point: Forgetting.

Author Kate Eichhorn wrote The End of Forgetting, a book about how times have changed and how social media has affected how our childhoods are remembered.

See, for this class, we only had to read the introduction and the conclusion but from what I gathered, she seems to believe that her upbringing was drastically different (maybe even better) because it wasn't entirely recorded for the world to see. Before social media was a big thing, mothers kept drawers and books full of childhood pictures and knick-knacks. She talks about the embarrassing moments we all had growing up and how you used to just be able to go and throw out whatever your mom kept and one day you'd all forget.

Now? Nope. Not possible.

Every achievement, embarrassing moment, sideswipe bang, Minecraft phase is on Facebook (or your parental's social media of choice). There is no going back. They will never delete it and if by chance you get their login when they die, friends and family have already gotten their copies to repost for the rest of your embarrassing life. 

Eichhorn makes this seem like the end of the world. As if the world would crumble if everyone knew that you had to have braces because you weren't born with perfect teeth or something. I don't think it's all that bad to be honest. This is where we ended up in class...

I am 20 years old. A lot of people in my class are right around that age as well (minus Vrooman of course). We were born in this awkward in-between stage where we have hard copies and Facebook posts of our childhood at different stages. If you're like me, your mom has an album of you as a child until about 3 or 4, then she switched to Facebook with a little overlap around 4 years old and posts your baby pictures next to the most recent photos of you on your birthday.

But she also has posted a loooooooooot of embarrassing stuff of me along the way. From videos of me wrestling with my brothers to singing into fans. From pictures of me at every Halloween to me having food in my mouth or within reach in every candid shot. I'm not embarrassed by it, though. I think it is funny and honestly, I prefer to show off the stupid pictures of me as a kid than the ones my grandma made me and my siblings take at Target every year (sorry grandma, if you read this, I still love you).

my all-time favorite, go-to childhood picture to show people
(yes the large soda was delicious)

I feel like in the past, you could just tear it up or "lose the book" and it was no big deal. Kids now all think they are cool and have always been cool so they don't care because there will always be somewhere online or in-person to fit in with. For my awkward "partial generation," it's hit or miss. Some of us don't care who sees us when our mom made us match pj's with our brothers and others do.

Now that middle ground I mentioned before: Reckoning.

Just to make this clear, Humphry defines reckoning for this purpose, as understanding, considering, and evaluating people based on media traces. One way Humphry explains this reckoning is by getting a different perspective on ourselves and others. The selfies we take, the selfies we see, the off guards that get posted, all offer a new look into peoples' lives.

This leads Humphry to introduce the idea of reconciliation. The reconciliation is realigning ourselves with the old and new parts of ourselves we post on social media. Looking back at who we once were and who we are now and coming to the terms with the fact that we've changed (looks, opinions, or otherwise).

I included this here because I feel like Humphry makes a good point. Whether we are making the memories we wish to make simply to look back on or we are regretting being unable to get away from the trauma of our childhood, it all comes together when we revisit these traces of our lives.

"One is never done. There is always more to document and share." (Humphry 112)