We've outsourced our memories to digital devices, and the result is that we no longer trust our memories. We see every small forgotten thing as evidence that they're failing us.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I hope that memory is valued - that we do not lose memory.
Memory is a fiction we tell ourselves: just a piece of the truth.
It's so necessary to try and record the cultural memory of people. To set it down for generations to come. To better understand where we are headed. The problem is, a good portion of what we choose to remember is about willed forgetting. Which we all do, I believe, to protect ourselves from what is too difficult.
Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.
Memories are like stones, time and distance erode them like acid.
Human memory is short and terribly fickle.
Over the last few millennia we've invented a series of technologies - from the alphabet to the scroll to the codex, the printing press, photography, the computer, the smartphone - that have made it progressively easier and easier for us to externalize our memories, for us to essentially outsource this fundamental human capacity.
If memories were indeed like what a camera records, they could be forgotten, or they could fade so that they are no longer clear and vivid. But it would be difficult to explain how people could have memories that are both clear and vivid while also being wrong. Yet that happens, and it is not infrequent.
There's a lot of things lost in the Digital Age.
Memory is the thing you forget with.