From happy moments to heartbreak, digital memory tools might be messing with how we remember—and forget.
I still don’t know what I did wrong. Only a few short weeks after we carried the luscious green plant into our new home, its protruding branches and leaves started to shrivel. Killing this living thing—an expensive “new home” gift to ourselves—still fills my partner and me with shame.
And yet, I was recently reminded of this plantslaughter, totally out of the blue, when my phone showed me a proud photo of my green offspring in its former glory as a “memory.” Digital memory prompts—being told “You have a new memory!” by a device or app—are now a normal part of our lives. The” feature, which generates flashbacks to posts from previous years. And now, memory prompts are a central part of many apps, from Instagram and Snapchat to a streaming app like Spotify, which makes a huge deal out of “Spotify Wrapped”—a yearly fanfare where our secret listening habits are turned into a social media spectacle. I notice digital memory prompts almost every spring, when I’m now reminded of the COVID lockdowns . Last week, a former colleague told me about the time her phone reminded her of “the worst weekend of her life,” when she attended a remote wedding and came down with food poisoning. “I shit my pants and threw up in front of a wild deer,” she said. “My phone regularly serves me the memory as ‘a beautiful day.’ ”Sometimes, we’re reminded of things that aren’t so funny. Friends have told me of being randomly shown romantic holiday pictures taken with an ex who broke their heart, or of a deceased family member while they were trying to grieve. The Americans in my life report being terrorized by “memories” of Election Day in 2016. With nearly endlesssuggesting that constant smartphone use is making our memories worse, it makes sense that technology would try to fill in the blanks. But these prompts don’t always get it right, and they might be making our lives more difficult., told me that digital tools have upended centuries-old practices of retaining our memories. “Keeping memories and then accessing them used to be much more costly and time-consuming,” he said. “Not only would you need to keep a diary, but to access its memories you would have to go up into the attic or wherever it is stored to retrieve it.”Now, with smartphones and a nearly limitless storage supply, Mayer-Schönberger says it takes much “more time and effort” to simply. The “memories” feature is in itself an example of this. Receiving these prompts takes zero effort—they’re automatic. But if you don’t want to receive them, then you have to manually turn the feature off . Mayer-Schönberger argues that forgetting is far from a passive act—it’s a very important skill. If we remembered absolutely everything that happened to us, we’d be overwhelmed with too much information. When it comes to grieving, or moving on from a breakup, forgetting can be a part of the healing process. Digital memory prompts, in their artificiality and unpredictability, might interfere with forgetting. “Our brain is designed to forget, and with good reason,” he says. “Forgetting helps us to focus on the here and now and on the decisions and the actions we need to take, rather than be tethered to the past.”Oliver Hardt, who studies the neurobiology of memory and forgetting at McGill University in Montréal, has argued that our overreliance on our phones to look up everything from recipes to directions might be making our memories worse overall. other people, only posting the good parts of our lives can contribute to feelings ofSince its inception, social media has thrived on context-free nostalgia. Some of the earliest trends on Instagram were “Throwback Thursday” and “Flashback Friday.” Their corresponding hashtags—#TBT and #FBF—became a part of the platform’s early language. Taylor Lorenz, author of, remembers the “GPOY” trend on Tumblr. Just like the never-ending photo prompts we see on X today, this functioned as an excuse for people to share old photos of themselves.Lorenz tells me that a turning point for the internet happened in 2011, when Facebook turned the “wall” into a “timeline,” which was designed to help people look back at their lives online. “This led to the creation of a number of apps based around nostalgia,” she explained. “Specifically the 1 Second Everyday app that was really popular in the 2010s, and TimeHop, which built a whole business around this.” Encouraging users to take a context-free trip down memory lane is an easy way for social platforms to monetize our nostalgia.“Social platforms realized that they could endlessly mine the content they already had and regurgitate it back to consumers,” Lorenz said. “It would almost be a waste for them not to do this, because not only does it engender us to their products, but it incentivizes us to keep posting. As we’ve been posting less, platforms have learned even more heavily into nostalgia, because they’re trying to spur us to share.” In response to the increased emphasis on nostalgia, there are now more ways of communicating online that aren’t meant to last. Snapchat and Instagram Stories, for example, disappear after 24 hours. (Instagram Stories are archived, but only you can see them—andMayer-Schönberger says that young people like his son are particularly savvy about what they share because they’ve grown up in a world where “throwbacks” constantly remind them that the internet never forgets. “Memory for humans has been so fleeting that when we then get tools to conserve, we overindulge in it,” he said. “We go overboard because we haven’t learned how to temperate our appetite for memory.”Perhaps the biggest issue with memory prompts isn’t being awkwardly reminded of an ex, or a dead plant, but how they keep us hooked on the past. “The internet has always allowed us to participate in mass nostalgia,” Lorenz said, because “social media encourages us to gloss over the bad.” Not only does this set unrealistic expectations for what constitutes a happy or successful life, but it can distort our view of previous eras.My Friend Made a Heartbreaking Request Before She Died. It Changed My Life Forever.of memory by reminding us of a key event, while simultaneously giving us a shortcut to forgetting most of what surrounded it. When replicated at a larger scale, this can lead to false memories—something we see everywhere fromto political movements that exploit these feelings of nostalgia, which essentially trade on the false premise that everything was better in the past. Many of the things we see in high-definition today—wars, poverty, inequality—have been edited out of a rose-tinted view of previous decades.It might seem like having more memories available to us on digital devices is giving us more choice. But not knowing when these memory prompts are going to appear in front of us can hamper our ability to forget. And they’re also a barrier to remembering things properly, in our own way. “If you really want to remember, then pour yourself a glass of wine and go through your diary or a photo album, or even scroll back on a device yourself,” Mayer-Schönberger said. “You should be able to choose to do that, rather than Apple or Facebook putting a version of the past right in front of us and making the choice for
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