Painted From Memory

The price seemed high, suddenly.

My web host emailed me on Black Friday, praying I was in a spending mood. This email informed me that my hosting plan would soon expire, but I could reup for another two years for a one-time fee. Said fee was pricey as a lump sum, but I could find the money somewhere if I truly wished to.

My wishes were the issue. The last time my hosting account was due for renewal, two years prior, it hosted a blog I’d written since the Clinton administration, a podcast I was trying to get off the ground, and a promotional site for a book I was working on. I didn’t hesitate to renew back then because I was thoroughly invested in all these endeavors and couldn’t imagine a future where I didn’t write everyday.

Fast forward to 2015, where the blog and podcast were defunct and the book festered on a hard drive, half finished. I was no longer sure what role writing had in my life and daily blogging seemed a quaint pastime not far removed from scrapbooking. My hosting account now functioned as little more than a memorial dedicated to failure. I felt as if I were being solicited to contribute funds to preserve a town square’s statue of a minor Civil War general falling off his horse.

And yet, I would have to think twice about giving up the account, because that would be tantamount to throwing everything hosted there in the garbage. I could archive the content after a fashion, but because all the content was housed in WordPress CMS’es, said archives would be virtually unreadable. That included 15 years’ worth of posts at my blog, thousands of them. The world wouldn’t weep if the vast majority of them were lost, but many of these posts were deeply personal reminiscences of my childhood. Others were documents of my child’s exploits. They were the only places I’d thought to put these memories. The idea of taking a torch to the whole lot made me cringe.

So the email from my web host presented me with an unpleasant choice: Pay through the nose to keep a dead site alive, or let it die and erase a huge portion of my past.

I suspect most of us will face a quandary like this in the future, if we haven’t already. How do we retain our past when so much of it is stored on the volatile, transient medium of the internet?

Despite the adage that The Internet is Forever, it is clear that web sites disappear as quickly as they arise, taking with them their content when they go. A modicum of attention has been paid to this issue and its impact on humanity’s wealth of knowledge. The Atlantic Monthly compared the internet to the great library of Alexandria and, when contemplating the rate at which sites disappear, lamented that “today’s great library is being destroyed even as it is being built.”

When people do talk about losing pieces of the web, though, their focus tends to be on “official” sources of informations. Sites dedicated to journalistic or academic sources — the “old” web — comprise the bulk of what’s being lost right now. Little attention has been paid to what will happen when the first wave of the social web begins to disappear, and what affect this will have on the retention of our own memories.

The facile answer to this question is that people will remember their own pasts the way they always have, the way they did for millennia before the internet or even photographs were invented: They’ll simply sit back, concentrate, and remember. But there is evidence to suggest that the internet has rewired the way our brains retain information.

Psychology experiments conducted at Harvard have shown that the ubiquity of the internet in our lives may have lead to a change in the nature and scope of our transactive memories—the memory we “store” remotely within our social circles. Humans have always relied on external sources to jog our memories, but this was typically done among our closest family and friends and for a relatively small number of things. (Think of the eternal marital back-and-forth of “Honey, have you seen my keys?”) In the Internet Age, that transactive memory has expanded to include the internet itself, and people tend to rely on it for pretty much everything.

One Harvard experiment asked subjects to type a bit of trivia into a computer. Half the subjects believed the trivia would be retained, the other half did not. “Participants did not make the effort to remember,” the researchers noted, “when they thought they could later look up the trivia statement they had read.”

Another experiment asked subjects to answer trivia questions with and without internet assistance. The subjects who used online searches to answer the questions professed greater cognitive self-esteem than those who didn’t, as if the answers came not from the internet, but from their own personal store of mental information. These results held even when false feedback told the subjects their responses were incorrect, their faith in the supremacy of the internet transcending the word of an official who told them they were wrong.

The study concluded, “The advent of the ‘information age’ seems to have created a generation of people who feel they know more than ever before — when their reliance on the Internet means that they may know ever less about the world around them.”

These studies made heavy use of the retention of “trivia” because when we think of the internet as a tool, we still consider its primary purpose that of a portable encyclopedia. If that were true, the Harvard experiments would not necessarily signify anything troubling. One could argue we’ve lost little when brain-space is no longer needed to store all 50 state capitals or the primary exports of Bolivia. “As we are freed from the necessity of remembering facts,” the Harvard study hopes, “we may be able as individuals to use our newly available mental resources for ambitious undertakings.”

But the internet hasn’t been just about trivia for a long time. It is now primarily a social space, the place where we interact with others and where our lives are documented. Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and the like are where we go to share what is going on in our lives right now and where we go to recall what happened in the past. So if the internet signifies our new, expanded transactive memory, it includes not only trivia, but our own memories.

I received a glimpse of this when I first started using Timehop, the app that presents a daily digest of social media updates from each day in the past. Often, a scroll through old tweets provided no more enlightenment than what everyone on the internet was angry about on Date X. But every so often, I’d stumble across a tweet about something my daughter said or did when she was little, or a picture of her, and realize I had no true memory of the moment.

It’s possible that if I hadn’t documented these things on Twitter, I would have forgotten them forever. It’s also possible that when I deposited these memories into the external bank of Twitter, I subconsciously absolved my brain of the obligation of holding onto them.

One day, these repositories will either disappear or revise their way of doing business. At that point, we will all need to figure out how much of our memory we want to reclaim as our own.

One day, Twitter will collapse, or it will slowly fade away, and no one will pay to maintain it anymore. When that happens, do you transfer all those status updates to Twitter’s successor to maintain memories in an online space, assuming such a thing is possible?

One day, Facebook may last for so long and grow so cumbersome to maintain that Mr. Zuckerberg will begin to charge users to access content posted more than 10 years ago. Would you pay to retain the portion of your life that resides there? At what price point would the cost of hanging onto your past prove too high?

If you have abrogated the responsibility of memory retention to online spaces, you may not have an internal memory of most of these moments, if any. So it’s possible the elimination of these online memories won’t cause you any pain, because you won’t realize you’ve lost anything at all. If, as the Harvard study pointed out, people tend to conflate the information on the internet with that in their own head, then the absence of a memory on the internet may “prove” to a person that the memory never happened at all.

Your adaptation to this reality will depend largely on your personality. If you are an emotional hoarder by nature, as I am, I envision many uncomfortable scenes in our futures where we scroll through a dying timeline, saving what we can, bidding an uncomfortable farewell to what we can’t.

I hope you haven’t had the experience of sifting through the belongings of a loved one who has died, knowing that all of these things meant something to that person but also knowing it’s impossible to hang onto all of those things, knowing you must choose what you have space for and what you do not. If you have gone through this, then know the future I imagine looks a lot like this, except we’ll each get to do it for our own lives.