What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
bloomberg.com
What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
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Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#2Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#3I make a point of just deleting everything, once in a while, as the digital mediums have failed me more than once, my trust is zero, and I refuse to build anything, that I will not deleet.
When and if, web space,email, phone #, are protected, rights of citizenship, built on historical rights to mail, and the legal protections it still holds, then fergetit, its just a non optional mega scam, and a generalised attack on personal property and freedoms.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#4>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local grocery store. They looked like they’d been printed on a machine even older and more obsolete than the “Ticketmaster counter” as a concept. You don’t need to be a techno-pessimist to acknowledge that digital tickets, for all their advantages in transferability and traceability, don’t serve this long-tail purpose.
I did the exact opposite. I hung onto a bunch of paper TicketMaster stubs for decades because I was indecisive about throwing them away or hanging on to them. The "sentimental baggage" surrounding those tickets distorted my thinking and attached too much importance too them.
And then I read about de-cluttering your life advice from minimalists and learned of a good hack that worked for me: Just take photos of your mementos and then throw them away.
That was the psychological breakthrough I needed. I digitally scanned all my old Ticketmaster stubs as *.tif files and then threw them out. I also had a bunch of useless novelty coffee mugs (free gifts from trade shows or past employers). I just took digital photographs of each mug and then gave them away at Goodwill. Preserving them digitally helped me let go of the physical objects. Everyone once in a while, I might revisit my digital scans of the concert tickets on my computer monitor and that's good enough for me.
Reading passages like hers reminds me that that some people need those physical mementos and some don't. In a similar vein, a lot of people like physical media like DVDs and CDs. In contrast, I got rid of my entire physical library of thousands of discs. I don't miss the space they took up at all.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#5>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local…
Yeah, I tend to hold onto physical theater programs and the like. And I look at them maybe once in forever and maybe bore guests with them from time to time. The theater I have a season ticket with stopped printing programs and that's actually just fine. I still save the one sheet flyers they send out but I don't actually care about the bios of the actors, etc.
My main issue with electronic tickets and the like is I really prefer to have a relatively robust set of records when traveling. I have broken a phone on a trip and the only reason it wasn't that big a deal was that I had paper info about my itinerary etc.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#6Crazy that an article with this title be posted at Bloomberg and be paywalled.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#7>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local…
same.
Something that also works for me is compressing.
Either by filtering: Of a bag of 100 tickets, or hard drives, keep the most important one.
Or reduction: Of a whole page of math doodles, cut everything except the most important part.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#8> Because our phones are pulling from a huge, contextless pool
There is so much context in your camera roll. So so much. Not all of it is understood yet, but it’s finally getting good.
> The physical archives we amass in drawers or old shoe boxes aren’t free from the threat of bad memories or meaninglessness
But they are oh so incomplete. You can dig through your shoebox of ticket stubs once an every few years at most - anymore and they stop losing that charm.
> But mostly our phones are full of stuff that doesn’t matter
They are also full of stuff you didn’t know would matter at the time but now does. One off moments of how you kid used to carry his stuffed animal in his mouth when he crawled. Architecture details of an old house you had forgotten. A photo of you an a close friend meeting the first time. These often spark sharing, then real connection with others in your life.
Sure - put your ticket stubs in a shoebox. But you aren’t losing anything by having your memories in your phone. You have the potential to gain so much.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#9Having accidentally lost lots of digital stuff many times, I have a mindset of not storing much, and closing anything I'm not storing quickly, and failing that, accepting that I won't miss it too much if it's gone. So I still depend on some things being stored reliably. It takes curation to decide whether I want to really keep something or risk losing it when I may want it later. This is one area where LLMs could be very helpful as a way of dealing with massive amounts of data that a human normally wouldn't sift through, though data reliability is still up in the air.
Re: What We Lose When Our Memories Exist in Our Phones
#10>As objects, paper tickets serve as proof of past lives long after their brief utility as proof of payment. I sat with my accidental time capsule for more than an hour, doing what my teenage self had probably hoped I might: linking each one to a buried memory as best I could. [...] But most of the tickets I’d bought myself, in person and almost always with cash, at box offices or the Ticketmaster counter at the local…
I think it's highly dependent on the significance of the memento. I have physical credentials I received for a major athletic event I competed in, and never in my life would I consider taking a picture of them and throwing them away.
It doesn't sound like you were all that attached to the coffee mugs to begin with, in which case digitizing them was a good move.
I'd imagine this is part of the reason why my parents still keep my terrible first grade art pieces framed on their desks.