memory objects

My mom was in Toronto last month, dealing with the deeply sad task of figuring out which of my grandmother’s painstakingly assembled photo albums to keep intact. For most of her life, my grandmother put together an album after every trip she and my grandfather took (and there were many). She admitted that it was sort of a pain to do, but knew it was worth it to have an album to look through, rather than piles of unsorted photos in the back of the closet. She also believed it was important to label places you’d been while you still remembered their names. The albums were beautiful, but when she died and the condo she and my grandfather lived in was sold, there wasn’t room to keep them all.

In sorting this out, my mom’s solution was to keep certain albums that were particularly elaborate or carefully done (those dedicated specifically to family photos among them), but otherwise to pull out the photos of my grandparents themselves and toss the rest. What got thrown out were photos of scenery—not so meaningful to the people who hadn’t seen it firsthand, except that the images preserved (sort of, if one’s prone to this kind of thinking) the way things had looked through her eyes. I can’t imagine how hard this was to actually do; I’m not sure I could have managed it. And yet, going through personal effects has to involve getting rid of some. It’s important. I think it’s also brave.

I thought about this while I read Rob Walker’s excellently (and eerily) titled cover story in the Times Magazine last weekend, “Things To Do in Cyberspace When You’re Dead.” The article raises questions about privacy and legacy and technology and entrepreneurship—but of course, I’m most interested in what Walker explores about memory and (by extension) nostalgia.

The article points out that when it comes to preserving our “bit-based personal effects,” we’re stuck between two defaults: saving too much (everything) and too little (nothing). We need to find some middle-ground, and think about making real choices about what we hold on to, where we keep it, and why. Walker quotes Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, who points out in his book that “forgetting has become costly and difficult, while remembering is inexpensive and easy.”

If it’s difficult to wade through physical stuff, it’s arguably even harder to sort the remnants of a digital life, and those who don’t understand it tend not to bother at all. And since there aren’t systems in place for allowing surviving family members access to their relatives’ email and Flickr accounts, they often don’t even have the chance to make the choice to do nothing. Even if there was a procedure (and it seems clear that it’s important to land on a solution to this relatively soon), there’s no easy way to differentiate between what’s important and what’s not. Online, we’re all kind of hoarders. With huge amounts of storage space and information piling up all the time, there’s not much incentive not to be.

Stacy Pitsillides, a grad student researching “digital afterlife issues,” explains: “If every object you’ve ever owned was a memory object…and we gave that to a family member and said, ‘You have to remember this person by all of these objects,’ then what position would we be in, and how would we ever remember everyone?”

Still, Walker cites a recent corporate study that “identified ‘chief memory officer’ as a kind of unofficial role take on by someone (often mom) in many families–the person who is paying attention to the idea that there may be no physical scrapbook or set of journals to hand down to future generations and the bits-and-bytes memory objects need to be preserved somehow.” Someone has to be in charge of this. Though if no one is, we won’t recognize the loss until it’s too late. Walker again:

In real time, we can record and distribute the most important moments of our existence, and some of the least. For the generations growing up in the Web era, this mode of being is more or less taken for granted. But the tools we use privilege the moment, not the long term; they also tend to make everything feel roughly equal in importance and offer us little incentive to comb back through our digital scribblings and sort out what might have lasting meaning from what probably doesn’t. The results are pretty much the opposite of a scrapbook carefully edited to serve as a memory object but could end up serving that function by default.

The Magazine ran a related article about six months ago, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting,” more focused on privacy and digital identity-formation than digital legacy. “The fact that the Internet never seems to forget is threatening, at an almost existential level, our ability to control our identities; to preserve the option of reinventing ourselves and starting anew; to overcome our checkered pasts,” wrote Jeffrey Rosen. He also quoted Mayer-Schönberger, and pulled out another choice quote from his book: “[W]ithout some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”