The Problem With Putting Social Media in Charge of Our Memories
The internet is very good at bringing up things from our past, but what if we don’t want to be reminded?
In late November of 2018, Facebook users who logged onto the platform found themselves flooded with old messages reappearing in Messenger as unread. The sudden surge of messages came from a bug that Facebook resolved the same day. But even after the messages vanished, the blip had a lasting effect on some users. As one journalist who saw messages brought back to life told The Atlantic, it was “yet another weird way that your past can come back to haunt you.”
Like the old Facebook messages, there are lingering reminders of the past in all our digital spaces. Odds are, you’ll scroll through Instagram and see a friend you’ve lost touch with has posted again, or reopen an old text conversation that reminds you of an older version of yourself — your jokes, stories, and slang preserved verbatim. These reminders can catch us by surprise or even kind of hurt.
“Many [messages] were from the day my partner, Dean, passed away,” one man tweeted after the Facebook bug, “& now I’ve spent my evening in fear of what else I’m going to see.”
