The memory paradox:
The more you try to capture your life, the more it slips away. More videos; time accelerates. More photos; memories are harder to access. Even the weekend that just ended feels like a blur. Yet, the images on your phone continue to balloon.
You’re at a live show. A wedding. A hike. You’re on maternity leave caring for an infant. You think: Wow. You reach for your phone. I gotta get this. Record. Stop. Filter. Share. Phew, got it.
Or, did you?
Probably not. Because technology is literally changing the way our memories work.
According to Diana Tamir (Department of Psychology, Princeton University): “Creating a hard copy of an experience through media leaves only a diminished copy in our heads.”
Why are we losing our memories?
Multitasking. Capturing and sharing photos or videos requires mental multitasking. When we multitask, we remember less.
Anxiety. In a world that is increasingly unstable, ranging from climate change to war to acute trauma like the pandemic, our mental faculties are siphoned off to assess threats, which degrades memory. And as we scroll to self-soothe, we inadvertently feed that anxiety, perpetuating the cycle of memory erosion.
Delegating. The same way we are farming out our creativity to AI, we are farming out our memory to the cloud. Our devices are perfect receptacles for images. But the less we ask our memories to be our receptacles, the less obligated they feel to show up. In an article in Scientific American titled “The Internet Has Become the External Harddrive of Our Memories,” the author asserts: “It may be that the internet is taking the place not just of other people as external sources of memory, but also of our own cognitive faculties.”
There was a time when our memories were the crown jewels of our brains. If I couldn’t remember something, someone else would. And I knew that someone. And I could ask them. Thus forming a vast chain of human memory that fed off personal interactions and vice versa. A global harddrive, if you will, stored in the minds of all humanity.
That model has vanished. But even if our memories wane, that doesn’t mean we can’t retain the beautiful, joyful, moving, magical moments of our lives.
When I started Memree Films, I thought of it as a record of a person. Who they were, where they’d been, what they’d done.
I now think of it as an essential component of the new model of memory reclamation–where technology doesn’t steal your memories but restores them.
After viewing her Memree Film for the first time, one client recently remarked: “Literally forgot about ALL OF THIS. It’s my whole existence wrapped up in a tiny bow. Just WOW. Truly a gift.” This is the power of memory reclamation.
With every Memree Film I cut, I realize the absolute wealth of emotion stored on our phones. And I am convinced we are–all of us–surrendering too much of ourselves to the technology we trust to store it. So, as we continue down this path of technology-induced-memory-flatlining, let us make something of the videos and photographs we sacrificed so much to take.
If we’re not gonna use our glorious, powerful, extraordinary memories, let’s at least make some glorious, powerful, extraordinary Memree Films.