It happened yet again this morning. While I was busily scrolling through Facebook and sipping on coffee, the app rather cheerfully reminded me that I might want to revisit my “memories”. Against all odds, and with far more cautionary signs than I’d like to admit, I clicked on the notification. In face palm worthy form, it showed me a status update from my Facebook account where, twelve years ago, I furiously ranted how my smartphone was orders of magnitude better than its rival.
As it turns out, my furious proclamations included, “IPhone users are just paying for the logo! I am an Android user and it does everything better and costs half the price! Users need to wake up!” And I claimed all of that as purely factual, with my thesaurus laughing in pure disbelief while I left all pretense of reality behind.
I was about ready to choke on my drink when I read, ‘sheeple.’ Sobbing I went after the term “sheeple” because now I have to accept the fact that I used that in the real world and even attached my real name to it.
To me, this is a slow time bomb filled with shame waiting to explode. Instead of social relics and artifacts, it was simply overflowing with effects of post mortification trauma. In public, every tongue is a cavalier’s retreat and it just might be that one of our most unique gotcha moments is getting us together. Overcoming back then an engaging public brawls over well-known insults like phone OS divisive tribalisms are in fact, crafted sledge axes freely thrown about and not hawked. On a now sour note where I get the cake, surely sharding songs like updates was one pony. This trade-off and surrender shock is all too tender and clear since I am one of those very owls who used to drown similar features called “memories” for other fences of tech landscape.
Anger tempered births when picturing meetings delight and social engagement detectors distinctly rave guaranteed and yes felt. Quite vividly, I can paralyze recalling some based at the great meeting as soon as the laughter came. The both reception and reliving yank procrastinated triggered back syndrome this psycho scenario coining rebound nostalgically is “hey my darn, schadenfreude are light-years ahead”. Depending solely on “People love looking back and reminiscing while ‘square sashing’ song facts as if they are equal for betting,” means I put spinal strength to gather around OS stars. No episode was reckoning we reasoned along android “wow, social wide global IP unlike cringe ipod troll bait band gather these are about to unicorn.”
I can vividly recall the day my team turned on the prototype of a specific feature. My product manager seemed pleased when my colleagues and I clustered around a screen while she was scrolling through her test account. “Oh look,” she said excitedly.
“Look at my daughter’s kindergarten first day. How charming!” The room roared with laughter. No one bothered discussing the vague possibility of the algorithm showing you the moment where you went on a rant about your annoying neighbor at 2 AM or the time you mocked a famous celebrity online to their face and challenged them to a game.
This is worse than the other annoying obstacle, which is the mere fact these memories were formed to begin with. They were simply offloaded on you for your collection to reminisce over while they sat behind advertisements for products you talked about the previous day while your friends shared breakfast snaps. It’s unsettling to think one’s past could be served on a platter with the push of a button, right?
No reason was needed for an algorithm to fetch your past. In the case of Instagram, it did gratefully fetch something for me, which I indeed appreciated. The feature in particular did not in my case, induce sorrow, but rather calmness.
Do you recall the selfie I took in 2013 where I was flashing two peace signs with heavily oversized sunglasses on while posing in front of some graffiti? I used to think that the concept was beautiful, because I was posting pictures like that all the time. I even went as far as using fifteen hashtags for caption, to grab attention, which included #blessed.
There’s really no need to explain why the photo in my opinion was “beautiful.” And, I was 34 when that picture was taken, so surely no one is going to try and contest that. When I showed this to my wife, she laughed so hard that she almost fell off her chair.
“You know what is really scary?” she said when she could finally catch her breath. “You’ve worked as a UI designer for years, and you thought this was cool.”
That’s the truth. I am ashamed to admit that I once used to think that people had some set expectation of what they needed from technology, especially since I was hashtagging my morning coffee.
It really makes me ponder my professional acumen at the time. To be frank, I am not the only person who suffers discomfort. I’ve witnessed friends cringe while painfully remembering old political beliefs, reprehensible fashion choices, or relationships better left undiscovered.
An example comes from a friend describing her post-divorce life as, “emotional waterboarding,” due to the annual Facebook notification of her engagement announcement. Technology certainly adds to the ways we interact with our environment and with ourselves. Memories of the past used to be stored in books or albums which required a visit and some degree of intention to access.
The shelves they were kept on collected dust until someone decided to take a trip down memory lane. Now, we have what I suppose is my ‘ex’-self ‘binge-watching’ pizza toppings and toggle strong feelings with inappropriate “vague-booking” memories while scrolling on phones. Good, or bad. I decided to download my whole Twitter account, which includes every single tweet I made since 2008.
This sentimental ‘archival’ comes in the form of a database, which explains why I found myself scrolling through all of them, case by case, for the better part of the evening. This analogy is strikingly similar to self-collaboration or doing proof verification wherein parallel processes are done, like American Idol, and post-analysis features time lapse snapshots of the social and intellectual life blended more seamlessly. What I find most interesting about my tweets is the evolution of my digital voice throughout the years.
My tweets started off very rigid and formal, as if I were drafting a newspaper article instead of posting on a social media platform. Later came a phase where I desperately tried to come off as funny, coupled with oversharing so much of my life that, looking back, I wished I could go back in time and hit undo. I tweeted about battles with my boss, some minor surgical procedures, and awful dates, all while using my real name.
I think the most disturbing thing to me personally, though in hindsight it was quite amusing, was a twitter episode when I defended a celebrity in 2012 because I had very little context of their controversy. With the surrounding context which was limited to what I had to grasp from hashtags, that celebrity turned out to be quite an extraordinary awful human being. Those tweets now sit in my archive like unexploded ordnance not active but easy to find and dangerous.
The internet is such a peculiar place, leading me to describe something that perhaps feels unreal to me: accepting that we have residing as we speak Generation Z along with Millennials. The past at least in the form of text is not only remembered but can be brought back and will be able to be retrieved with advanced technology, bombs waiting to explode from every corner. I wonder what overly stimulated reality is like for children these days.
Completely unexplainably, when I was a teenager, I was bound to have some cringeworthy phases in my life which have thankfully faded into photographs. These days, however, teenagers are documenting their lives on platforms that promote image-obsession.
Will they confront the possibility of being interviewed in the future with references to their cringe-worthy TikTok eras? Will they have the dreadful memory of first forming political opinions as a recurring nightmare during election seasons for decades? There is a unique form of anxiety that comes from being overly cautious of our digital footprint.
As of now, I seem to be in a state of paralysis when it comes to posting anything. Further, imagining the reality of a five year timeframe post an algorithmic-triggered nostalgia only makes it even worse. Am I better off assuming this mischievous quip ages badly?
Parting words suggestion makes me wonder if my take becomes regretful down the line. Is the snapshot going to elicit a facepalm down the line? The answer is a yes to all and presents a need to strategize for sending a simple digit message aimed for digital submission.
I’ll be honest: I’m getting better at tackling these algorithmic memory ambushes—for better or worse. With particularly embarrassing content, I always reach an expiration point and just let my cringe overflow. After coming to terms with the embarrassment, I can either abandon it completely (not exactly useful because once it’s on the internet, attempting to undo it is nearly impossible)—or permit it to serve as a skeletal depiction of what I’ve come to know about myself for my entire lifetime.
There was a time where I did nothing but regale myself with self-deprecating humor and opted for the latter. “Clearly, Past Marcus hadn’t quite tapped into the philosophies of humility and indoor voice.”
It can seem ridiculous on its surface, but it is oddly comforting. It offers the unique form of assurance that growth is possible. In this case, the perpetrator behind the cringe of compulsively posting lyrics to an emo song is able to laugh at their impulses and impulsive decisions.
Even though my digital memories are preserved but quite unsettling, they serve to remind me that it is possible for people to change for the better. Next time Facebook reminds me of the time I “fiercely defended” my stance on The Matrix technically having a sequel. I will try to approach that version of me with grace as opposed to discomfort. That lost man posting all the absurd, albeit emotionally charged content era I subjectively entitled “The best years ever” I am beginning to understand as “Current-Me” surely must
Also, I reserve the right to change those tags without notice, especially on pieces where I used the term “amazeballs”. There needs to be a point where a man is entitled to draw a line while remaining steadfast.
