[TRANSCRIPT]
The internet allows us to discover all sorts of things about people, but it doesn’t tell us what those things mean. We construct meaning for ourselves, and the meaning we construct can be way off base.
Hi everyone. Welcome to Digital Hope Talk. I’m Lauren Hug and I thank you for listening and being willing to explore better ways of navigating our digital world together.
This is Episode 13: Digital Artifacts Don’t Tell the Full Story. People are more than the fragments we find online.
When I was 12, I had a terrible poodle perm and an unfortunate orthodontic device called a “lip-bumper” that forced my lip to protrude like Bubba’s in Forest Gump. It wasn’t pretty. I hated my school pictures from that year. Over my mother’s objections, I confiscated every photo I could find of me during that time. No one, aside from members of my immediate family, has ever seen those photos. And, because of my confiscation, I’m confident no one ever will.
They were taken before social media.
In The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media, media and culture professor Kate Eichhorn explains that ridding the world of unflattering digital photos, status updates, or other online content about our pasts is far more complicated than disposing of analog photos and memorabilia. With digital memories, we have no idea where other copies may exist or what else they are linked to, and we can never be certain the image is completely gone from every device and social media network it has been shared to. “An act of destruction that once took mere seconds is now a massive and nearly impossible undertaking,” Eichhorn says.
Memento, Christopher Nolan’s critically acclaimed movie filmed in 2000 (four years before Facebook’s founding), tells the story of Leonard, a man with short-term memory loss searching for his wife’s murderer. He creates memories by tattooing himself and taking Polaroids of things he doesn’t want to forget. Over the course of the movie, told in reverse chronological order, we learn that Leonard manipulates these memories — burning photos and memorabilia — to tell himself a lie about what actually happened.
The movie wouldn’t work in a digital world. Instead of relying on tattoos and Polaroids, Leonard would have taken photos on his phone, creating a digital archive of his investigation. Although he could still have deleted his own photos and used his social media accounts to construct a false narrative about himself and his life (plenty of people do), it would have been nearly impossible for him to completely escape the realities of his past. Pieces of it would have been posted and tagged by his now-deceased wife and their network of friends, family members, and acquaintances. If he talked about his wife or anyone else he was looking into, whoever he was talking to would instinctively turn to the internet to see what they could uncover.
“A photo posted online is usually linked to an entire social network of people both familiar and unknown,” writes Eichhorn. “[T]he information that accumulates on social media platforms is also part of other people’s collections.” On average, roughly 40,000 people can see, assess, and comment on anything posted to Facebook, say the authors of Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age, part of the Springer Law, Governance, and Technology interdisciplinary research series. Online content comes with “an entire social context,” says Eichhorn. One which we “may or may not wish to retain.”
Netflix’s 2022 series The Woman in the House Across the Street From the Girl in the Window offers a hilarious example of why Memento wouldn’t work today. SPOILERS AHEAD » In this parody of “domestic suspense dramas,” the main character, Anna, friends a handsome new neighbor on Instagram, follows links to his girlfriend’s account, concludes the girlfriend is cheating, then friends another good-looking guy she sees in the girlfriend’s photos. Anna later suspects her neighbor may have murdered his girlfriend. She googles “Neil Coleman wife death,” pulling up articles and video clips that reveal he was a person of interest, but ultimately cleared, in his wife’s demise. Anna then searches the wife’s name and finds an obituary that includes the name of the wife’s sister. She finds the sister on Instagram, sees a photo of the sister with a magazine cover, zooms in, and finds the sister’s address.
The digital world allows us to discover all sorts of things about people, but it doesn’t tell us what those things mean. We construct meaning for ourselves, and the meaning we construct can be way off base. “[L]arge online platforms have become global repositories of digital memories,” say the authors of Remembering and Forgetting in the Digital Age. “This has sparked an increasing number of cases, in which individuals have been harmed by digital memories.”
It’s tempting to be voyeurs on social media. Scrolling through entire histories of Instagram photos, Facebook posts, and tweets, we feel as if we’re uncovering the full story about a person, piecing together a more complete profile of them based on their past social media activity as well as things others have posted about them. Like Anna in The Woman in the House, we play detective, telling ourselves a story about the person based on our own experience and preferences as well as generalized assumptions about how most people would behave on social media under certain circumstances.
When I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t had much non-social media contact with for several years, she was surprised to learn I had gotten divorced many years earlier. We hadn’t had an in-person conversation since it happened. I hadn’t made a big announcement about it on Facebook, and I don’t post often about my relationship, so how was she supposed to know my status? Sure, she could have done her own sleuthing around my Facebook feed, but she wouldn’t have uncovered a lot. I tended to stay relatively quiet on social media about that part of my life.
Just like the assumptions we make when listening to people, the assumptions we make based on excavating someone’s online fragments can be inaccurate and lead to misunderstandings. That wouldn’t occur if we’d simply allow people to tell us their story instead of us trying to discover it.
People use social media in very different ways. Some post every few minutes with all sorts of details about their life. Others post infrequently, with little discernible pattern as to what makes them pick up their phone and upload something to a social network. Yet we tend to think we know what’s really going on in someone’s life based on their social media alone.
Before social media, we couldn’t make assumptions about people based on an online archive of whatever experiences they chose to document on social networks and whatever other people posted about them. Digital grace restores that privacy to and mystery about people — remembering that anything we encounter online requires context to make true sense of it.
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This is an excerpt from Digital Grace: Pouring Benevolence into an Outraged World. Book available for purchase at Amazon.
[AUDIO] Digital Artifacts Don't Tell the Full Story