Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
I know I worry more when it’s late at night and I should be sleeping instead. But I think maybe a large part of my personality is driven by my struggles with media, archival, memory, and ephemerality.
Like there’s “fear of missing out” but beyond that there’s a fear that I’ll just forget things I’ve actually experienced in media and in my own life. I’ve always felt bad at committing events to memory.
Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
Note that I’ve never had trouble getting good grades and never compared this to other people’s episodic memory; I think it’s just part of the human condition. However, it is one that doesn’t sit comfortably with me, especially when you start looking into research about how open to suggestion our own memory is.
Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
You can’t change the past, but you can change history. The things we see looking at the past are informed by our present situation—both as individuals and as a culture. The person I was as a teenager might be totally different from the person I think I was as a teenager. My memory is not raw data; it is a reconstruction.
Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
I guess the most negative way of saying this is that I’m anxious because I’m a memoryless vessel of a person living through awful times and inundated by microblogs and streams and YouTube videos that are lightspeed and transient by default. And a lot of the “real” media is also bad and transient, sometimes with really awful labor conditions backing it up.
Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
I shouldn’t put transient media down too much. Heck, I make it. It exists for many reasons, and it is very comforting. You don’t go into every conversation with a friend thinking you’ll remember it forever. I do sometimes worry that I, and we, am not making the right kind of curated archive of good work.
Feeling an anxiety and trying to put it into words.
I think I like retro media partly because it’s a greater escape from the awful present but also because it lets me feel like I’m helping us collectively do a better job at remembering things. There are technical concerns too, like “hey, does this game become forgotten if there’s no way to circulate the disc images or repair the computer that runs it, etc”. So programming matters too. But anyway...