Social Media Won’t Save All Your Memories
I upload memories online to reminisce later, but special pictures and videos shouldn’t be saved to the internet: A columns piece I wrote for the Capilano Courier.
Social media is the modern-day photo album. Images of celebratory events and informal moments alike are uploaded every second, everyday, to share with friends, family, and a faceless, global audience. By turning platforms like Facebook and Instagram into their digital scrapbooks, users are devaluing their videos, photos and messages by posting for the sake of self-affirmation through likes and comments.
If everything stays on the Internet, do your memories exist forever, or are they uploaded to be buried and lost in algorithmic networks?
I think it’s safe to generalize that everyone has gone through the disaster of accidentally losing something digitally: whether it’s forgetting to save your essay’s recent edits, having a water-damaged phone after dropping it into the toilet (it’s more common than you think), or getting an account hacked. Nothing is more depriving than losing an obscure time’s worth of hard work and snapshot souvenirs into cyberspace.
Although our excessive trust with technology is broken when corrupt files and errors strike, it is instantly restored after coming to terms with the fact that you can’t really do anything about it. This rapid surrender to technology and our incapability to fix these situations is what makes technology so powerful and profitable. You can pay a fee to desperately restore what was deleted, or move on from the hardship and start over — most people choose the latter. This helplessness makes abandoning photos and assignments so easy, and as a result, has fostered the habit of uploading special files into a digital memory program instead.
Applications like Apple’s “iCloud” and Google Photos save photos and videos to an accessible digital storage space right after they are taken. There is no need to click and drag hundreds of photos into a USB drive folder or, if we’re discussing historic sources, burn files into CD-roms, when everything is saved automatically. And although this media is easy to access wherever, whenever, social media platforms picked up on the nostalgic aspect of these digital souvenirs, and added a whole lot of convenience to it.
In March 2014, Facebook introduced ‘On This Day’, a feature that displays a past status, ‘Friendversaries,’ and other major events associated with the user that occurred on the same day. Facebook ‘Memories’ was launched in June 2018 to compile these recollective posts into a designated page and recaps content into a personalized video.
In Facebook’s media releases for these announcements, research indicated that these daily highlights of moments of the past had a “positive impact on people’s mood and overall well-being”, as the features provided digital space for users to reminisce, re-live their experiences, and share them to friends and family.
No one really wants to scroll through thousands of Facebook statuses and comments as a main source of nostalgia, but if the platform presents your awful debut profile picture from 2009 or anything from the “LMS (Like My Status) for a TBH (To Be Honest)” era, you will want to see more. Or, if it’s that embarrassing, not.
But, this is the problem with social media turning into our digital photo album: our memories are adopted and maintained by multinational media corporations and reintroduced according to what is considered a ‘major event’, often based off of the level of impressions the post initially received.
As shown in the screenshot above, I’ve lived with my sister my whole life, but the day that we added each other on the platform is considered a milestone. It definitely gave me and my Facebook friends a laugh, but it didn’t awaken any deep memories of the day I chose to add her to my Friends list. How do Facebook’s algorithms know what digital memories are most ‘significant’ to you, and what do they dismiss?
In a similar digital time-capsule sense, I created a ‘Finsta’ (Fake Instagram) in my last year of high school with the objective of uploading photos that I want to look and laugh at in 5 years time (which flew by quickly). The most common use for these secondary Instagram accounts is to share personal and candid content with a smaller, trusted following.
There is nothing wrong with privatizing information from the masses, and the strange concept of organizing pictures according to what is ‘Main-worthy’ is an article to be written another day. However, regardless of it being a Private account, I’ve realized that the 975-page (and counting) digital photo album is not the safest place to gather notable photos. Instagram, like Facebook and others, is constantly collecting data to ‘personalize’ the user’s advertisements. As shown above, isn’t it just a Virgin Mary-type miracle that an ad for the Superdogs pops up after I post a photo of my dog…
And sometimes, social media storage systems become a thing. Instagram introduced ‘Archive’ in June 2017, a feature that allows users to temporarily hide rather than delete posts and control the arrangement of their profile.
Their media release described it as “a space just for you, where you can revisit moments without having to keep them all on your profile”, implying that the update grants users an ability to sort out posts according to aesthetics. In developing this component, Instagram displays the relevance of digital presentation, makes users consider what they show and hide rather than concentrating on the memorable substance of these posts.
I’ve seen past high school classmates go through the trouble of unarchiving embarrassing high school Instagram photos, sharing them on their stories to wishing other past classmates happy birthday, then proceed to re-archive them because they didn’t match their feed. I’ve since unfollowed these kinds of people, and you should too.
Realistically, this whole article is a roast on myself, because of my sixth sense for immortalizing memories via photos or videos. In 2019, I recorded every little moment to compile into a video I called ‘My Year in 4 Minutes’.
From special events like birthdays, nightclub outings, and vacations, to the boring study sessions, first snowfall, and meals, I took my phone out to record a few seconds of the day. The editing was exhausting, and I could tell my friends did not enjoy my natural instinct of whipping my phone out to capturing everything on video, but my excitement to reminisce fueled my urge to complete it, for future-me to enjoy.
Ironically, I shared it on Instagram for the world to see, though I intended for it to be just for me. Even after the praise I received for this personal project, the digital video capsule wasn’t worth it. I realized that the few polaroids on my wall, pictured above, held more memories than a 4-minute video ever could.
I have this constant fear that one day, a popular social media platform would get hacked and thousands of accounts and content would be deleted all at once, just… poof. If Facebook and Instagram hypothetically shut down, I’d be able to recover everything I took last year til now thanks to iCloud instantaneously downloading my photos and videos. My “2019 in 4 minutes” video also gives me a snapshot view of the year. But, everything I’ve posted from when I (was technically too young and illegally) used Facebook in 2010 and my archived and ‘Finsta’ Instagram posts from 2017 would be gone. I’d only have 2019 to cherish.
After this, I’ll be laying off my Finsta and start adding to my Polaroid wall again. The internet, although immortal, is an unpredictable space of too much information. It shouldn’t be considered the main source of flashback anecdotes. This is an extremely Boomer suggestion, but actually live in your moments and turn your phone off during meals. Because without social media like Facebook and Instagram, where would your memories go?
