Why Do We Forget So Much When the Internet Remembers Everything?
Social media makes it hard to forget and AI can suffer from "context decay", leading to worse reasoning and answers. What can we do about it?
There is a book called “There is No Antimemetics Division” and if you want to joke with anyone who has ever read it, tell them you read it too, but forgot what it’s about.
The meta-idea behind the book is forgetting. But forgetting has become hard to do in the age of social media. When you are young, you may have a group of friends you hang out with. You do everything with one another. You are inseparable. But as time wares on, everyone drifts apart at a slow pace until one day, the friend group is a distant memory. Now everyone leads their own lives and does their own thing and has a new friend group to hang out with. This is a part of time.
This aspect of life is healthy. Interests change over the years. School and then careers can bring us to new corners of the world. We don’t forgot those first groups. Instead, they live in our memories.
Social media has made this almost impossible to do now. We are now friends with people who never disappear from our lives. Their lives are posted everyday. Their anger or love or grief displayed in pixeled emotion of text next to their an image of their face. Or some other avatar.
Social media makes it hard to forget because it is with us every minute of the day. People of a certain age group and older will remember a care-free youth. If you are a part of this cohort, you can attest to a certain carelessness life had. Mistakes were always made; they were also easily forgotten. Moving forward with life became powerful because we could learn from those mistakes. Part of making mistakes is learning and moving on. They weren’t front and center in our lives and they didn’t define who are as people. Forgetting makes change possible.
We can’t forget now. Mistakes made online can now be used as a weapons, depending on how bad the mistake can be. Cancel culture does exist and it is not the privy for those on the left. Anyone can join in and take part in it.
There are those whose past lives should be brought in the open, no matter how ugly. Politicians are running for office to represent the people. Damn straight we should be able to go back in time and see what they have done, good and bad. Elected officials are put on a platform effecting the lives of citizens. And every citizen has a right to know what type of person the candidate is and used to be.
Using cancel culture for most other people is bullying. Some random human being making a trash comment doesn’t have to have their life torn to pieces. But maybe they do because this is the world we live in now.
Forgetting now seems like a strange luxury from the past. A way for two people to move on from one another for whatever reason. Now, unless you have never joined a social network ever, it seems almost impossible to move on from someone without “deleting them from your timeline”, which sounds more dramatic than it is.
What about the other side of the coin? Is there anything we do forget? Are there things we do forget? In fact, the answer is yes.
Twitter/X has something called the main character. It’s usually a person but it can be an event or idea trending throughout conversations. The joke goes, you don’t want to be the main character of the day. And indeed you don’t. This is usually the person everyone is talking about for all the wrong reasons. They may say or do something which breaks social mores and the mob goes after them. Sounds terrifying.
Online mobs move in waves. They will call people normies, thinking there is something unique about themselves. And in the moment, they won’t forget. But then wait a few days and they will forget everything and move on to the next main character.
What I find strange about these online movements is how little they usually matter to the rest of the world and how fast they move on. These are events for the terminally online. And sometimes, they only matter to the terminally online. Sometimes though, main character move markets for all the wrong reasons.
The internet has made being terminally online almost necessary. We fry our brains over mindless information and arguments by trading time away from the real world. Sometimes I’ll rip off my shoes and touch my feet to the grass exactly like the meme. Technology may be a human made technology, but we’ve made our current creations to oppose nature for some god forsaken idea.
AI is changing the way we approach forgetfulness and memories. These tools have memories built in to them. While this works for consistency, it also feels weird when you ask a series of questions and it pulls towards a previous direction because you had asked about it so much. This is called “context rot” and it is why AI answers can feel like they are degrading with time. If you experience this then it might be time to flip the memory switch to off.
A few weeks ago I went through my Facebook friends list and mass deleted random people I’ve met over the years. People I’d met once or twice, drinking in a bar on a random Tuesday night well over a decade ago, but have no attachment too at all. Power networkers may scoff at this idea, but for the most part, I grew tired of life updates from people I don’t know. People that, if social media had never been created, I would have forgotten existed as the years passed by. What a strange feeling, deleting unknown friendships.
The internet itself is a strange dichotomy. An information firehouse, most of us have online lives there in some way shape or form. We should be more intentional with how we live online. It is after all, our greatest method of communication to the world.