Remember Me. Davide Sisto
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(3) making the documents and the digital footprints each one has left easily accessible. An interactive archive that, unlike a traditional one, preserves ‘those traces and remains of the past that are not part of a culture of active memory’.13 They are those biographical aspects of individual memory, ostensibly lacking any primary use for society, but at the same time capable of keeping our digital I perennially alive, reproduced in every single record that is made public.
Facebook’s (ongoing) metamorphosis can be seen in the fact that looking back has been its most important feature for some time now. The perennial exhumation of what has happened within it seems to be a literal translation of the pathos and resonance Vilèm Flusser attributes to the internet in general, describing it as a ‘way of loving our neighbour’.14
At some point towards the end of December, Facebook provides each of its two billion users with a video entitled ‘Year in Review’, alternating, in little more than a minute and against a strategically coloured background, the images and posts shared by the user over the past twelve months that received the highest number of likes and comments. Just like the brief videos created skilfully by online newspapers, in which the rapid succession of Juventus’ most important goals illustrates their victory march towards their umpteenth championship title. Or those shown on television, in which a collage of a talk show’s highlights is used to celebrate its season finale. At the end of the Facebook video, we read: ‘Sometimes, looking back helps us remember what matters most. Thanks for being here.’
Anything but improvised, this ‘looking back’ exists all year round within standalone initiatives such as the #10YearChallenge. All it took was a simple hashtag, which went viral in a matter of minutes in January 2019, to convince millions of Facebook users to post photos to their Walls, publicly comparing a current photo of themselves to one taken ten years earlier. The most cynical of observers interpreted this challenge as yet another cunning strategy to obtain substantial amounts of personal data and images with which to train facial recognition algorithms. The fact remains that beyond any possible hidden agendas, millions of people dug up personal photos from 2009 and wallowed in collective nostalgia for a good few days. This took the form of a self-satisfied longing for an imagined, and distant, golden age: a decade before, yes, but still in reach. A time that, when observed with the disenchantment typical of the present, does not include the often hastily made choices taken over the years, nor the disappointments into which once-held ideals have since mutated, nor the inevitable failures, and nor does it see, on a much more basic level, the wrinkles and white hairs as merciless markers of Chronos’ insensitivity. This is a nostalgic wallowing into which Instagram also plays, becoming involved in the challenge and therefore party to the onslaught of millions of images accompanied by the same hashtag. The initiative takes on further significance if we remember that the majority of personal events that have taken place over the last decade, events this explicitly invokes, have been documented on a daily basis on the above-mentioned social networks.
Since late spring 2015, the retrospective gaze has become a daily protagonist thanks to the On This Day feature. ‘You have a new memory’ is the notification text that celebrates this ritual, automatically directing our digital devices to a post, video or photograph shared on Facebook (or one in which we have been tagged) on the same day as it occurred in the past. Apart from recurring or historical events, On This Day rhapsodically revives biographical events or personal stories using algorithms. Initially, this ‘looking back’ is only visible to the user, who is then free to decide whether or not to share (and therefore make current) the memory with all of their followers. If the user chooses to share the post, they can leave it as it is or they can modify it partially with a comment that provides context for the present.
Alternatively, they can relive these moments in a private way or eliminate them completely. The stated aim of On This Day is to connect the present to nostalgia, sparking new debate between users that aims to resurrect that which, once it has happened, should, in theory, be lost forever. In other words, it tends towards just one of the two paths that, according to Johann Jakob Bachofen, characterize any act of recognition: not the long, slow, hard path of rational reconstruction, but the shortcut ‘that is travelled with the power and velocity of electricity, the road of the imagination that suddenly grasps the truth, in a split second, the moment it comes into contact with archaeological remains without relating it to anything’.15 Suddenly, past and present find themselves mixed together, making it particularly difficult to distinguish clearly between the two. We see this when a user chooses an old photo as their current profile picture. The comments written by followers on the day in which it was originally shared merge with those written later, causing them to become confused. More often than not the consequences of this are equally odd. For example, it could be that beneath the image of a woman are comments from both her current husband and her ex (unless he has been blocked), both of which refer to her as if she were their wife. Only a close inspection of the date in which the post was originally shared by the reader avoids any suspicion of polygamy.
On 13 June 2018 there was a passage from On This Day to Memories that was as decisive as it was emblematic. While On This Day offered the user a single post shared on the same date of a different year, Memories (www.facebook.com/memories) is a parallel timeline included in the Explore section, where all the posts shared on each day of all past years are collated. Memories wholeheartedly adopt ‘the simple mystery of concomitance’ that Roland Barthes attributes to photography, believing the date the photo was taken to be an integral part of its whole. The date does not denote a style, but ‘it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the generations’.16 The Memories section does not perhaps aspire to such heights. However, its objective is clear from the moment in which it greets us with the words: ‘We hope that you enjoy looking back on your memories on Facebook, from the most recent memories to those long ago’ [my italics]. Scrolling back through the wall, we find everything we have shared on any given day laid out in descending order. On 25 February 2019, I click on Memories and immediately discover that I shared two photographs on the same day in 2018: one depicting my city, Turin, blanketed in snow by the arrival in Italy of the freezing Siberian wind named ‘Burian’ by enthusiastic meteorologists, and the other showing a ticket for the Nirvana concert I went to as a teenager on 25 February 1994 in Milan, in the venue that used to be called the Palatrussardi. Ticket number: 8211. Cost: 32,000 lire. That was the Seattle grunge band’s penultimate ever concert, as Kurt Cobain committed suicide just a month and half later. This event was therefore relevant from both a personal perspective and an historical one. Moving down the page, I re-read two of my posts: the first, dated 25 February 2017, refers to the faltering political situation in Italy at that precise moment, while the second, dated 25 February 2016, contains a number of personal considerations of a vaguely existential nature (not purposefully so) on the passing of time. The subject shared with my followers the previous year was somewhat lighter: a piece of dark chocolate eaten at 1am. Going even further back, I discover that in 2013, a friend who lives in Finland had written a post on my wall notifying me he was going to a heavy metal concert, knowing how much of a fan I am. In 2012, I was tagged by another friend after an evening spent in San Salvario, an area of Turin famous for its nightlife. And so on, all the way to my first ever 25 February post on Facebook: that from 2009. Once this journey back through the personal memories of that day has come to an end, close friendships from past years are listed alongside special videos or collages celebrating new contacts. Significant events from the user’s personal life are then listed, regardless of whether or not they happened that day: the anniversary of a wedding or a graduation, or the start of a new job. The ‘looking back’ ends with a succinct: ‘That’s all for today.’ Anyone can go into Memories to re-share one or more of these memories, making them current in the same way as On This Day. When there are no posts shared on that day, Facebook points this out and invites the user to check the next day or perhaps activate specific notifications for memories so that none are missed.
The invention of the Memories section, according to Facebook’s product manager, Oren Hod, is justified by the fact that around ninety million people use On This Day each day, using the social network to relive experiences that are long gone, and therefore revive their own past. As a consequence,