We Have Instagram Stories But Do We Have Memories?
By: Just Call Me Betty
Tags: Psychology, Social Media, Self, Mindfulness, Life

At last year’s OTR II Tour, I stood aghast as a sea of tall, young, blond Dutch millennials held their phones above their heads, necks craned back for 2.5 hours of Beyoncé and Jay Z. Every few minutes they’d lower their arms briefly, only to upload their latest cinematic oeuvre to Instagram/YouTube/SnapChat, etc.

“Why can’t you just, you know, put your phone down and watch the concert?” I finally whispered exasperatedly to the girl in front of me, her head turning slightly away from the blue glow as she glanced in my direction.

Why anyone pays for a concert ticket only to watch it through a 5" screen is baffling and irritating beyond belief.

How is it possible to form lasting memories when we are more concerned with capturing our experiences on our devices than being present in a moment?

So What Makes a Memory?

Brian Becker, associate professor of neuropsychology at Lesley University, defines memory as “the process in which the mind interprets, stores, and retrieves information.”

But how can you interpret or store or retrieve information if you’re using your phone to capture an experience rather than your brain?

There are three stages that your brain goes through to form a memory:

Echoic — When your brain passively gathers information through sight and sound, usually lasting a few seconds Short-term/Working — After echoic, your attention kicks in and you temporarily store information to use later. The “working” part of this stage is when your brain stores information to manipulate later (like learning a new skill and applying it down the road). Long-term — These memories could be retrieved a week, a year or a lifetime later. Your brain rewires itself to establish these kinds of memories.

My strongest memories are triggered by sound, smell, touch and taste.

Instant nausea induced by wintergreen mint (a 3-day car trip in my grandmother’s Buick when I was 12, mints always in the ashtray). The smoothness of a Doberman’s coat. The taste of coconut cream pie. The bruise from slamming my fist into my hip, rocking out to my favourite band.

Constantly having a phone on your ear *may* be affecting your memory, kids

Aside from my annoyance and sadness that people are prioritising vapid social media brownie points over meaningful memories, there’s also an increasingly large body of research about how teenagers’ today may be fucking up their cognitive function because they’re always on their phones.

In a 2017 study, researchers found that even five minutes of mobile phone use had a negative impact on the participant’s ability to recall a list of 10 words on a computer compared to the control group.

A 2018 study conducted with 700 teens found that ongoing exposure to the radiofrequency electromagnetic fields (RF-EMF) may have harmful effects on memory. More on that here.

Caveat: I am fully aware that my age (I’m 37) gives me a very different perspective about mobile phone usage.

When I was growing up, you captured moments on film with a camera. You’d take the film canister out, bring it to a drug store to have it developed and cross your finger you didn’t have your finger over the lens when you picked the photos up a week later.

You picked out the good photos and stuck them in a photo album to collect dust on a shelf until relatives came to visit.

When my kid and I sit together and flip through the photos from my youth, I have answers to all of his questions: Who is this? How old were you? Where were you? What’s happening here?

I remember it because I experienced the moment before the photo was taken.

“Back in the day,” when you snapped a photo with a camera, you had one shot, maybe two. Anything more than a couple of clicks pushed you closer to that inevitable “oh shit” moment when you run out of film.

You didn’t take 20 versions of a photo for instant review to get the perfect angle with the perfect lighting. There were no filters. You didn’t spend time constructing a cute caption, accompanying GIF or twitching bunny ears. It wasn’t so constructed.

And the photos you would take weren’t shared with hundreds or thousands of strangers. It was a way for you to trigger a memory down the road. Maybe a handful of people would see the photo over the years.

Today, you snap photos for your feeds to gain social media capital. Those photos are not for you, they’re for others.

Moments are not seen as an investment for forming lifelong memories but rather as an opportunity to get likes and comments.

Photo by Sávio Félix on Unsplash

I live in Amsterdam. A stunningly beautiful, historic city dissected by canals hundreds of years old. Narrow canal houses tilting sideways, cobblestone sidewalks warped by the undergrowth of tree roots, thousands of bikes streaming every which way. I work in the city’s main train station and every morning, I watch as tourists walk out and see the city for the first time, eyes wide and jaw dropped.

And what’s the first thing they do? Take out their mobile for a selfie.

Where are we again? Dunno, let’s take a selfie though! (photo credit: istockphoto, franckreporter)

I can’t help that I feel a twinge of sadness when I see people of all ages closing themselves off to what could be the forming of lifelong memory for seconds of social media recognition. And, maybe, maybe I’m being a bit cranky about the whole thing. I take selfies (despite my deep discomfort about it) and probably spend more time on my phone than I should.

But I will never, ever let my phone come between me and fully connecting to an experience.

I am not willing to replace the eternal with the ephemeral.