Why Is Managing Our Memories Such A Struggle in the Digital Age?

Humans have been recording and sharing their stories for thousands of years. Where we once painted pictures on cave walls, we now carry mobile devices that can snap photos, record videos and instantaneously communicate what is going on in our lives via our social networks. Advances in technology and wider access to those technologies have vastly increased the volume of things we record about ourselves.

Despite these advances, our personal histories are more fragile than ever. We share fewer spoken stories, put pen to paper less, write in shorter formats, print fewer photos and overestimate the reliability of the hardware, software and online services that now store much of the content of our lives.

Services like Facebook and Twitter enable more of us to express ourselves online yet their inherent lack of privacy and ephemeral nature means deeper, more personal content is often never posted or is drowned out by the constant stream of noise from others.

Too often our precious life stories fade from memory, are forgotten completely, or are stripped down to a few snippets stored unsafely somewhere that lack the details needed to provide a deeper experience in years to come.

So why is managing our memories such a struggle in the digital age?

Here’s the top ten problems we face when managing our memories:

1. Recording the stories of our lives is no longer part of our routine. Keeping journals and writing letters used to be commonplace and these physical records were some of the most valued items passed from one generation to the next. We now text, email and post, but too often requirements for brevity and concerns about privacy restrict what we record and there is limited thought given to preservation. Many of our most important memories, thoughts and feelings stay trapped in our minds, fade with time and are lost when we are gone: the funny things our kid said; how that favorite teacher influenced us; the travel experience that changed our perspective on life…all lost forever.
2. We believe pictures tell it all. Most of us still believe “a picture is worth 1000 words” but how often have we looked back on one of our photos and struggled to identify what was going on at that moment? If we can’t recall the context and stories behind our own content, it will be impossible for others to do so in the future. Without backstories, the value of our pictures are significantly diminished and they are more likely to be discarded. Imagine a biography with nothing but a picture section — this is what most of us are creating today. Even if our digital pictures somehow happen to be preserved, what will they be worth to us and others without the stories and context that give them significance?
3. The volume of memories is overwhelming. The huge volume of digital content we now produce ultimately results in us preserving less as our most precious memories are buried in giant blobs of digital junk. Harder to evaluate what we have when it is sitting on a disk rather than in a box somewhere.
4. Memories are fragmented across storage media and people. The personal digital content that illustrates our lives is typically fragmented, stored in social media accounts, devices, online storage accounts, hard drives and other storage media. It is also fragmented across family members and friends. This fragmentation makes it difficult to collect, organize and preserve the memories for us, and others, to look back on.
5. Social media services control access to our content and are ephemeral. What happens to the content on our social media accounts when the service goes out of business or we die? Most of us would not want to archive everything posted to our social media accounts but some content is meaningful and worthy of preservation. Currently, this content is likely to be lost or, in the case of Facebook, “memorialized” for your Facebook friends but inaccessible after that. There are even services now like Snapchat specifically designed to delete memories after a short period of time.
6. Data storage providers have limited organization and visualization features. Cloud storage solutions like Dropbox are useful for data back-ups and accessing content from multiple devices but they are typically file folder based and do not offer features such as adding notes, tagging and changing metadata. This limits how useful they are for capturing and preserving the precious memories of our lives.
7. Digital media may fail, be damaged or become obsolete. Remember floppy disks? Storage media technologies change rapidly and content stored on obsolete media becomes inaccessible. Furthermore, digital media is susceptible to environmental damage and failure.
8. Digital formats change. Saving a digital file does not guarantee it can be opened at some future date. There are thousands of file formats and many have become obsolete or can no longer be opened by the newer versions of the applications that created them.
9. Printing memories has declined. As people have become more comfortable with consuming digital content, the amount of content being converted into physical memories like printed photographs, has declined. While there are risks that physical content may be lost or damaged, having a physical record as well as a digital one increases the chances of content being preserved.
10. Organizing our stuff is always a chore for another day. Sorting and digitizing our physical and biological memories is seen as an overwhelmingly enormous task and we’re paralyzed by not knowing where to start and the idea that we need to do it all and do it perfectly. We naturally postpone making difficult decisions about what to keep and throw away and often justify our procrastination by thinking “nobody is interested in this stuff anyway”.

At Arkiver we’re dedicated to helping you save life stories by providing ways to overcome these factors preventing memory preservation. Try the web app at www.arkiver.com or download the iOS app to your iPhone and iPad (Android coming in 2 weeks)