This morning a memory popped up in my Facebook feed. It was a post from three years ago about making sure my daughter (who was almost 11 at the time) felt seen, heard, and worthy of taking up time and space. The post is accompanied by smiling pics and carries this seal of approval: “All photos are EG approved, and the last two photos are her own direction and selection.”
Our lives are endlessly intertwined with other human beings, so in documenting our own experiences on social media, we are documenting other people’s lives as well. We often post without even thinking about their comfort level with what we choose to share about them. Ever since I started paying close attention to digital identity, I’ve given my children veto power over anything I post regarding them.
Before uploading photos, tagging someone, or identifying someone by name in our posts, it should become common courtesy to ask people how they feel about being mentioned on social media in that context. Even if we think a post is flattering, funny, or harmless, we can’t assume all the people in our lives will feel the same way we do.
In 2019, actress Rachel Bilson posted a pre-social media throwback photo of herself with high school classmate and fellow actor Rami Malek to Instagram. She intended to honor his Oscar nomination for Bohemian Rhapsody, but later revealed on the Armchair Expert podcast that Malek reached out to her via Instagram asking her to take the photo down. She said the response caught her off guard because she thought the photo was “funny and I think it's so important to be able to make fun of yourself.” She panicked, thinking “Oh god! What did I do?”
Bilson’s panic — and whatever Malek felt upon seeing the photo on social media — could have been avoided if she had checked with him before posting. After experiencing a similar situation where a friend asked me to remove what I thought was a flattering photo of her, I’ve posted far less photos with friends.
Checking in before posting about someone eliminates much of the spontaneity, impulsiveness, and real-time appeal of posting in digital spaces — unless they approve a photo in the moment, it takes time and effort to obtain consent — but it’s the considerate thing to do. It should take precedence over our desire to share immediate updates.
Since that’s not standard digital etiquette (yet), Bilson did the graceful thing upon being asked to remove the photo: she respected Malek’s request. Unfortunately, media outlets had already captured and reshared the photo. Despite Malek’s preference that the photo not be accessible and Bilson’s willingness to remove it, it’s still easily viewable.
Removing posts upon request and considering whether there’s still a reason for old posts of ours involving other people to remain accessible online should become part of our digital thought process. Just because someone was okay with a post at a certain time in their life, doesn’t mean they’ll always want it out there.
“The plasticity of human memory enables us to evolve and grow, to change over time as we learn and reflect, and as we adjust our values and preferences,” says Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Professor of Internet Governance and Regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute, in Remembering (to) Delete: Forgetting Beyond Informational Privacy. Digital memories and artifacts, however, threaten that ability to evolve and grow. Having so many moments of our lives connected to and published by others can force us to remember things we’d rather forget.
When it took more effort to create mementos, we put more thought into the things we wished to memorialize, and we did it in a relatively private way. We made photo albums, scrapbooks, and memorabilia boxes mostly for ourselves, those we shared the experience with, and the small circle of people we wanted to tell. We consciously decided to retrieve these tangible representations of our memories, sometimes as a ritual (looking at a Christmas photo album every year) and sometimes when a memory surfaced and we chose to look back at the things we’d saved.
It was rare for a photo or piece of memorabilia to pop up in an unexpected place and time. Few people other than us could access them, and they had to be physically retrieved. We determined when and how we wanted to engage with the artifacts of our pasts.
Digital media changed all that. Combining a filmless camera capable of taking unlimited photos with a phone we carry around with us constantly means we can take pictures of everything all the time. Social media apps allow us to upload those photos to a digital archive accessible by anyone in our networks. Photos are no longer taken mostly on special occasions and for personal and family memories. They’re taken to document anything we fancy and are intentionally shared with a large number of people well beyond our closest friends and family.
And a lot of the thinsg we document involve other people.
This “digital entanglement” as professor of human-computer interaction Elise van den Hoven calls it, makes the already difficult task of moving on from past experiences, relationships, and versions of ourselves much harder than in the pre-digital world. “When things are going well, social media platforms do an amazing job of connecting people and maintaining relationships, and smartphones help you effortlessly create a rich digital record of your life together,” van den Hoven says in a December 2021 Psyche article. But when you need to move on, “you find that you’re trapped in a digital web together too.”
Her research involves the impact of digital technology on romantic break-ups, but it’s illuminating regarding the impact of digital possessions and memories on anyone who has gone through a transition and doesn’t want to be constantly reminded of their past. “People who choose to delete tend to adjust better to their new circumstances,” van den Hoven says.
But, as we’ve already discussed, we can’t delete what other people have posted about us.
This is especially true for children, who have no ability to manage their own digital identities until whatever age the platforms (and regulators) deem “old enough.” They can’t untag themselves from posts or upload their own photos or versions of events.
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.
That was before social media. I wouldn’t be so confident no one would ever see those pictures if the ability to post them online had existed back then.
With digital artifacts and memories, we have no idea where other copies may exist or what else they are linked to, and we can never be certain the artifact is completely erased from every device and social media network it was shared to. “An act of destruction that once took mere seconds is now a massive and nearly impossible undertaking,” says media and culture professor Kate Eichhorn in The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media. She explains how 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.
“[T]he ability to leave one’s childhood and adolescent years behind, along with the likelihood of having others forget one’s younger self, are now imperiled,” Eichhorn says.
Human-computer interaction expert Van den Hoven believes the burden is on tech companies to “consider how they can better support people in disconnecting digitally” from unwanted reminders of their past. Until that happens, though, we can better support people by not posting things about them without asking them first; not amplifying things it’s reasonable to assume they might want to forget; and by doing whatever we can (removing tags, deleting photos we’ve posted, limiting who can see certain posts, hiding comments, etc.) to help their digital disentanglement process.
Mindful of this, I showed today’s memory post to EG and asked her if she still approved of it existing in cyberspace. In the past three years, she’s grown and changed a lot. I want to honor that growth and change by allowing her to move past previous versions of herself.
Today, she’s okay with that post — and this one. I make room for the possibility that, when the memory pops up again in years to come, her answer may be different — and I’m committed to honoring her wishes then.