The end of forgetting: Is social media holding us hostage to our pasts?

Borges passed away before social media, which has turned every one of us into a type of Funes who can never forget anything in the world of excessive documentation.

The phrase used by the protagonist of his short story, who refers to this type of memory as a garbage dump, is the best way to describe memory conditions that social media created and spread, launching a thorough recollection system without scrutiny or sorting that rendered each person imprisoned by the deeds of his past and unable to overcome and reproduce it.

The world of digital storage is nothing more than the world of garbage memory which never goes away and keeps coming back to haunt one's present and force him to return to his past mistakes that were once part of his natural and ordinary development.

The act of preserving these mistakes and their continuous resurfacing, as one progresses in life, transforms them into permanent embarrassments that undermine the progress one has made.

It confines the individual within the realm of social media, filled with hateful comments and bullying, leaving them feeling as if they are plummeting into an unfathomable abyss. This constant reminder of past errors prevents them from facing the challenges of everyday life and embracing a fresh start based on accumulated experiences and maturity.

From print to video

The concept of childhood and its detachment from the adult world is linked to developments in the media and publishing industries. With the spread of printing, children's literature also began to emerge and spread, after children were often treated as mere accessories within natural settings, or appeared only as faded shadows of parents and adults.

Earlier, in the era of fine art painting, children were typically depicted as part of a broader composition, often receiving minimal attention and significance within the artwork. The paintings by Annibale Carracci, Everhard Jabache and Jean Michelin bear witness to this.

The original framework of the modern logic of social media began with the spread of photography, which was initially out of the reach of children despite being one of its favourite subjects.

They were presented in a completely adult-dominated environment where it was impossible to imagine a child capable of handling the first heavy cameras or engaging in the technical aspects of developing photographs in darkrooms, etc.

The rapid development of photography has made it possible to treat children as distinct individuals, separate from their parents.

This change was influenced by the logic of George Eastman, inventor, businessman and founder of Kodak, who told his employees that "what we do during working hours determines what we have in the world, and what we do during play hours determines who we are."

Eastman's vision was to create an industry that turned playing into an endless resource, leading to the creation of the affordable Brownie camera, aimed specifically at children. This marked the beginning of recognising children as a significant consumer force deserving special attention.

Introduced in 1900 at a cost of $2 (equivalent to $60 today), the Brownie was the first camera accessible to the general public. It was named after a series of popular Victorian children's books by Palmer Cox.

With this camera, children began to document themselves outside of the adult world, but the obstacle to creating a complete and private representation of childhood was the censorship imposed by photo shops.

The Brownie camera continued to dominate the market until the 1960s when the Polaroid Swinger instant camera was introduced which specifically targeted teenagers.

With the Polaroid camera, which does not require the development of photos in photo shops, teenagers became creators and subjects of their own photos, and the world of adults began to fade, and with it the world of forgetting, even though this effect was limited to the number of copies that are produced and distributed.

The boom that preceded the explosion of high-quality social media documentation came with the PLX-2000 video camera in 1987, enabling the formation of a new and private representation system that exposed desires and moments of privacy in a visual format.

Sadie Benning's 1989 film "Me and Rubyfruit", captured with such a camera, remains an exceptional testament to the world of female adolescent desires on the one hand and marks the beginning of an era of super-documentation that still required an open and ongoing circulation mechanism to become indelible.

Although the circulation of such media formats was constrained by their fragility and inability to endure for an extended period of time, they were able to expose to the public the private lives of adolescents by producing materials that could be circulated as soon as they were captured, which had been previously impossible.

Escape and permanent return

In the 1990s, there was a rush to use nascent internet technology emerging in a publicly accessible form, offering a platform for individuals to break free from their past and the physical world.

In her 1995 book "Life on the Screen", sociologist Sherry Turkle described this technology as a "space of forgetting" arguing that "when we traverse the screen into virtual communities, we reconstruct our identities on the other side of the mirror".

Turkle's ideas align perfectly with the broader context that portrays the Internet as a product of self-liberation and escapist discourse.

The domain of the internet, as defined by researchers in the 1990s, was associated with fantasy, escapism, and the imitation of new roles. Turkle was inspired by the work of psychoanalyst Erik Erikson and his identification of the concept of the moratorium outlined in his 1950 book "Childhood and Society".

Erikson believed that the adolescent deals with the world at the mental level of the moratorium, which is the stage of moral postponement between childhood and adulthood.

Turkel, on the other hand, explains that the issue lies not in the experiences themselves, but in the consequences that accompany them. Both Erikson and Turkel view adolescence in general as a time when individuals seek to escape the repercussions of their actions.

Erickson's Moratorium "is a period characterised by tolerance on the part of society and provocative amusement on the part of young people."

When it was first introduced, the internet promised to provide safe experiences even in times of economic crises and AIDS. It was a product of the individual's imagination that allowed evading the concept of boundaries and was practically associated with the notions of freedom and individuality, opening up the possibility of enhancing privacy.

Enter Facebook

With the advent of Facebook in 2004 (it was recently rebranded as Meta), the internet turned into a completely different realm, and that world that once provided an escape has gradually diminished, giving way to the natural self and the harsh realities of the world.

This signalled the onset of persistent digital traces and the accumulation of what is known as the "digital footprint".

The term cyberspace, which is derived from science fiction literature, is getting closer to becoming a precise description of the circumstances surrounding coping with a new space that opposes the idea of escaping from oneself and instead compels the individual to return to specific formats from which he thought he could overcome and forget.

The emergence of cyberbullying

In 2002, two years before the emergence of YouTube, Ghyslain Raza a young child, recorded a video using a primitive lightsaber, clumsily imitating a character from the well-known "Star Wars" series.

This video was accidentally discovered by a colleague and later uploaded to the internet in 2003 by another colleague. The video was downloaded over a million times, turning Raza into the first "meme" on the Internet.

Raza was hugely affected by the distribution of the video, as he lost his friends and his life became miserable. There was no way to stop the rapid spread of the video.

Despite Raza's parents taking legal action, the video managed to accumulate 27 million views on YouTube and was replicated and featured on popular shows like The Colbert Report.

This led researcher Dina Boyd to study the phenomenon of "how widespread internet interest and network sharing can lead to mass public defamation."

While pursuing his law studies at university, Raza found himself constantly haunted by the video's lingering presence. After numerous desperate efforts to distance himself from the video, he took up the subject in 2013 with the aim of assisting other children dealing with cyberbullying issues.

Reflecting on that period in an interview with the French magazine l'actualité, Raza described it as a profoundly bleak time during which he felt inferior and unentitled to live his life. These experiences have clearly cemented his identity forever as the "Star Wars Kid."

The story of Rehtaeh Parsons is even more devastating.

The teen attended a house party in 2011 and had a drink that made her vomit. She was then subjected to abuse by a group of teenagers who recorded the incident and shared the video clips online.

Thus began her long journey of suffering, during which she was labelled as a prostitute and found herself socially isolated.

Although an investigation into the incident was launched, it turned out there was insufficient evidence to bring charges against those responsible. On 4 April 2013, Parsons committed suicide, turning her story into a stark testament to the dangers of cyberbullying.

Communicative capitalism and forgetfulness

Author Danielle Collobert tried to hide her first book, published in 1961, and made sure that all copies in circulation were collected. She believed that she could complete this process on her own, that it was up to her and her willpower, and she largely succeeded.

One copy managed to evade destruction but remained unpublished until after the author's demise. However, things would have been much different if Collobert had been born in the 1990s.

This particular book would have become her final work, forever associated with her name. Concealing it would have been an impossible endeavour, independent of the writer's will, and would only generate more attention and a greater digital footprint.

What one wishes to delete varies, and while it may sometimes be necessary, it is usually at odds with Big Tech's extensive network of commercial interests.

Tech engines that rely on the utilisation and analysis of data to improve their services are disrupted by the desire to disappear. The conflict is no longer between memory and forgetting, but rather between forgetting and the increasing market value of data.

The need for young people to be able to make mistakes and move on with their lives constitutes a major concern of legislators, as data erasure laws fall into the public-private category, and face the issue of the conflict between the right of the individual to be forgotten and the public interest.

The dilemma, however, is that social media itself is what transforms people into public figures.

Journalist Judi Dean describes the rising value of data as "communicative capitalism" where "the value is in the trading itself, not in content".

This explains the insignificance of using the internet to express political and liberation movements such as the "Arab Spring", "Black Lives Matter" movement, and the "Occupy" movement that launched slogans against the policies of the technology corporations, as was the case with "Xerox" company that developed dry-photography technology, thus providing an easy and low-cost service for activists who used it to issue ow-cost flyers and publications.

In the cyber social media world, with the ever-evolving use of information, every activity turns into accumulated data, which is sorted and used for purposes contrary to those of its owners. Communicative capitalism, according to Dean, is capable of absorbing "everything we do" and turning all our interactions into raw material for capital.

The need to forget

Your image on social media can harm your career, personal or professional future. According to recent studies, one-third of university admissions officials look up their applicants online.

In 2017, Harvard University revoked the approval of 10 high school student applications after finding that they shared offensive memes for a Facebook private group.

Identity data collection, organisation, cleaning, and virtual fingerprint management, scanning, and cleaning services are already widely available online. This could pave the way in the near future for the emergence of a digital record-cleaning profession.

The old means of communication allowed people to control and decide with whom we to speak and engage. This is no longer possible with modern means of communication that confine the individual to the sphere that represented one's first home.

One's transition to a new world and a new environment does not mean that he/she is no longer a part of the old communication circles that bring with them all the social networks he/she left behind.

This trend has not only left its mark on the experiences of individuals but also on broader experiences such as the experience of migration.

As former immigrants moved elsewhere, they lost touch with past experiences — especially the painful ones — and began to grow and recover.

Today's immigrants — due to their deep attachment to social networks through applications such as "Find My" to track friends through iPhones and other phones — remain connected to the painful issues, making recovery difficult and arduous.

Nietzsche points out that the act of forgetting is not simply a passive force of inertia, as superficial people think, but rather an active, repressive and positive capacity in the strongest sense of the word.

Frederick Bartlett, in his 1932 book "Remembering", says that "forgetting is of great psychological importance."

The concept of "motivated forgetting" was developed by neuroscientists Michael Anderson and Simon Hanslmayer.

They believe that maintaining positive feelings or focus, belief in a particular condition, and confidence or optimism may require limited access to experiences that undermine those conditions.

Experimental psychologist Benjamin Sturm notes that forgetting is frustrating, but having it is better than not.

When Freud refers to a disguised memory, he means that childhood memories are subject to an editing process by linking them to something else or by hiding what happened at the same time. Its task is to protect the person from the painful recollection of terrifying and unbearable events.

Modern neuroscientists have shown that memories are constantly updated and a disturbing event is replaced by a filtered one, especially during wars and major crises, giving the example of remembering the loss of a personal toy during war.

Prior to social media and super documentation, memory's defence mechanism was pushing in the direction of filtering and forgetting the unbearable, and enabling onward motion, but this is no longer possible.

Our memory has grown uncontrollable as a result of being constantly and violently attacked by all the situations we have experienced, and we have become vulnerable to the bullying and cruel stares of others, which keep us trapped in a world of shame and fear.

The word 'window', which used to mean looking out, now means the 'internet window', the closing of which does not prevent others from carefully examining and exploring our privacy.

Data has taken on a life of its own, not tied to its owner, and key takeaway from "The End of Forgetting" is that we have become akin to forced labourers for big tech corporations, and our job is to generate data.