Smarter Than You Think: How Technology is Changing Our Minds for the Better. Clive Thompson
everything. For him, forgetting would be a gift. “My memory, sir,” he said, “is like a garbage heap.”
Technically, the condition of being unable to forget is called hyperthymesia, and it has occasionally been found in real-life people. In the 1920s, Russian psychologist Aleksandr Luria examined Solomon Shereshevskii,18 a young journalist who was able to perform incredible feats of memory. Luria would present Shereshevskii with lists of numbers or words up to seventy figures long. Shereshevskii could recite the list back perfectly—not just right away, but also weeks or months later. Fifteen years after first meeting Shereshevskii, Luria met with him again. Shereshevskii sat down, closed his eyes, and accurately recalled not only the string of numbers but photographic details of the original day from years before. “You were sitting at the table and I in the rocking chair … You were wearing a gray suit,” Shereshevskii told him. But Shereshevskii’s gifts did not make him happy. Like Funes, he found the weight of so much memory oppressive. His memory didn’t even make him smarter; on the contrary, reading was difficult because individual words would constantly trigger vivid memories that disrupted his attention. He “struggled to grasp” abstract concepts like infinity or eternity. Desperate to forget things, Shereshevskii would write down memories on paper and burn them, in hopes that he could destroy his past with “the magical act of burning.” It didn’t work.
As we begin to record more and more of our lives—intentionally and unintentionally—one can imagine a pretty bleak future. There are terrible parts of my life I’d rather not have documented (a divorce, the sudden death of my best friend at age forty); or at least, when I recall them, I might prefer my inaccurate but self-serving human memories. I can imagine daily social reality evolving into a set of weird gotchas, of the sort you normally see only on a political campaign trail. My wife and I, like many couples, bicker about who should clean the kitchen; what will life be like when there’s a permanent record on tap and we can prove whose turn it is? Sure, it’d be more accurate and fair; it’d also be more picayune and crazy. These aren’t idle questions, either, or even very far off. The sorts of omnipresent recording technologies that used to be experimental or figments of sci-fi are now showing up for sale on Amazon. A company named Looxcie sells a tiny camera to wear over your ear, like a Bluetooth phone mike; it buffers ten hours of video, giving the wearer an ability to rewind life like a TiVo. You can buy commercial variants of Bell’s SenseCam, too.
Yet the experience of the early lifeloggers suggests that we’re likely to steer a middle path with artificial memory. It turns out that even those who are rabidly trying to record everything quickly realize their psychic limits, as well as the limits of the practice’s usefulness.
This is particularly true when it comes to the socially awkward aspect of lifelogging—which is that recording one’s own life inevitably means recording other people’s, too. Audio in particular seems to be unsettling. When Bell began his lifelogging project, his romantic partner quickly began insisting she mostly be left out of it. “We’d be talking, and she’d suddenly go, ‘You didn’t record that, did you?’ And I’d admit, ‘Yeah, I did.’ ‘Delete it! Delete it!’” Cathal Gurrin discovered early in his experiment that people didn’t mind being on camera. “Girlfriends have been remarkably accepting of it. Some think it’s really great to have their picture taken,” he notes. But he gave up on trying to record audio. “One colleague of mine did it for a week, and nobody would talk to him.” He laughs. Pictures, he suspects, offer a level of plausible deniability that audio doesn’t. I’ve noticed this, too, as a reporter. When I turn my audio recorder off during an interview, people become more open and candid, even if they’re still on the record. People want their memories to be cued, not fully replaced; we reserve the existential pleasures of gently rewriting our history.
Gurrin argues that society will have to evolve social codes that govern artificial memory. “It’s like there’s now an unspoken etiquette around when you can and can’t take mobile phone pictures,” he suggests. Granted, these codes aren’t yet very firm, and will probably never be; six years into Facebook’s being a daily tool, intimate friends still disagree about whether it’s fair to post drunken pictures of each other. Interestingly (or disturbingly), in our social lives we seem to be adopting concepts that used to obtain solely in institutional and legal environments. The idea of a meeting going “in camera” or “off the record” is familiar to members of city councils or corporate boards. But that language is seeping into everyday life: the popular Google Chat program added a button so users could go “off the record,” for example. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, the author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, says we’ll need to engineer more artificial forgetting into our lives. He suggests that digital tools should be designed19 so that, when we first record something—a picture, a blog post, an instant messaging log—we’re asked how long it ought to stick around: a day, a week, forever? When the time is up, it’s automatically zapped into the dustbin. This way, he argues, our life traces would consist only of the stuff we’ve actively decided ought to stick around. It’s an intriguing idea, which I will take up later when I discuss social networking and privacy.
But the truth is, research has found that people are emotional pack rats. Even when it comes to digital memories that are depressing or disturbing, they opt to preserve them. While researching his PhD dissertation, Jason Zalinger—now a digital culture professor at the University of South Florida—got interested in Gmail, since it was the first e-mail program to actively encourage people to never delete any messages. In a sense, Gmail is the de facto lifelog for many of its users: e-mail can be quite personal, and it’s a lot easier to search than photos or videos. So what, Zalinger wondered, did people do with e-mails that were emotionally fraught?
The majority kept everything.20 Indeed, the more disastrous a relationship, the more likely they were to keep a record—and to go back and periodically read it. One woman, Sara, had kept everything from racy e-mails traded with a married boss (“I’m talking bondage references”) to e-mails from former boyfriends; she would occasionally hunt them down and reread them, as a sort of self-scrutiny. “I think I might have saved some of the painful e-mails because I wanted to show myself later, ‘Wow was this guy a dick.’” The saved e-mails also, she notes, “gave me texts to analyze … I just read and reread until I guess I hit the point that it either stopped hurting, or I stopped looking.” Another woman, Monica, explained how she’d saved all the e-mails from a partner who’d dumped her by abruptly showing up at a Starbucks with a pillowcase filled with her belongings. “I do read over those e-mails a lot,” she said, “just to kind of look back, and I guess still try to figure what exactly went wrong. I won’t ever get an answer, but it’s nice to have tangible proof that something did happen and made an impact on my life, you know? In the beginning it was painful to read, but now it’s kind of like a memory, you know?”
One man that Zalinger interviewed, Winston, had gone through a divorce. Afterward, he was torn about what to do with the e-mails from his ex-wife. He didn’t necessarily want to look at them again; most divorced people, after all, want their organic memory to fade and soften the story. But he also figured, who knows? He might want to look at them someday, if he’s trying to remember a detail or make sense of his life. In fact, when Winston thought about it, he realized there were a lot of other e-mails from his life that fit into this odd category—stuff you don’t want to look at but don’t want to lose, either. So he took all these emotionally difficult messages and archived them in Gmail using an evocative label: “Forget.” Out of sight, out of mind, but retrievable.
It’s a beautiful metaphor for the odd paradoxes and trade-offs we’ll live with in a world of infinite memory. Our ancestors learned how to remember; we’ll learn how to forget.
In 2003, Kenyan-born Ory Okolloh was a young law student who was studying in the United States but still obsessed with Kenyan politics. There was plenty to obsess over. Kenya was a cesspool of government corruption, ranking near the dismal bottom on the Corruption Perceptions Index. Okolloh spent hours and hours talking to her colleagues about it, until eventually