When was the last time you’ve been with family and shared a story about a time when a picture on Instagram really changed you?
Have you ever written an essay about our the historic cultural significance of a TikTok video?
Have you ever even felt a desire to reread a favourite blog post?
I’ll accept their may be the occasional yes to these answers but I presume mostly the answers are no.
By and large our experiences online are not memorable. They don’t create memories. They don’t provide stories of going to camp, or breaking a leg playing hockey, or visiting a national park that are retold over and over at family gatherings.
We don’t have mementos and tchotchkes from our times online to remind us of our experiences.
I’m pretty sure much of the internet is designed so we don’t remember, and so we keep returning over and over again.
We spend so much of our life “on the internet” creating very few memories. If we don’t remember the internet, what will we have left to remember? What stories will we tell each other in our final years?
What kind of people are people without a memory?