Losing our memory

In the movie Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind Jim Carey's character pays a doctor to literally erase specific memories from his mind. Eventually he realizes that his memories are precious to him and he struggles to stop the process of them slowly disappearing from his mind. While none of that is literally possible, it does still happen in a way.

The other day at work, I accidentally deleted a file I'd just finished creating. Bah! So I called IT to see if they could recover it for me, but unfortunately they couldn't. The way our server is configured, if you delete a file from the server, it's gone for good, right away.

For some reason, that made me think of something my mother told me once. There was a day when my grandmother made my mother help her burn all her private papers. Old letters, cards, notes, etc. My mother was stricken that Nana would destroy her own history like that. But Nana didn't want anyone reading her private stuff after she was gone. I can't say I blame her...I'd probably have done the same thing. But I can totally relate to my mother as well, wishing that we still had that connection with Nana.

I have a box full of old love letters. I have old diaries and greeting cards and photos. Some of them I wouldn't want other people reading, most of them I wouldn't care. But more and more these days, my memories are kept on my computer. I have this blog. I have tons of photos and letters and emails and chat logs and all kinds of stuff that, ten years ago, would all have been on paper, if I'd even bothered to keep most of it.

There's considerably more of it now too, than there would have been ten years ago. Nowadays it's so easy to just file an email away on the computer. No need to find room for it in a box full of other letters. And when I want to read it again, I can find it in seconds. I don't have to go riffling through boxes and boxes of old paper letters that probably aren't sorted in any order at all.

But you know...that's kind of the shame about it, isn't it? We can neatly file thousands of emails and chat transcripts away on a single computer where they're very easy to find. You can go straight to that single letter you were looking for. No scanning other letters to see if they're the one you wanted. But that was part of the pleasure of it all, wasn't it?

I remember poring over old boxes of letters and cards looking for a particular one, and along the way I'd come across dozens of other things I'd completely forgotten about. I'd stop and read and smile or shed a tear and enjoy that memory all over again. I could spend a whole afternoon looking for one letter, getting sidetracked by dozens of others and in the end I might never have come across that particular letter I'd set out looking for. But I didn't care, because I'd had such a wonderful time with all the others I'd found.

And what about when I'm gone? That box of love letters (if I haven't destroyed it) may make interesting reading for someone someday. But will they bother to get on my computer and find all those many, many files on here, or better yet, stored out there on the Internet. Will they read these electronic voices I've saved away?

Somehow I think not. I imagine someone finding my computer and simply wiping it clean without looking at the files. Maybe keeping the programs to use for someone else, and deleting all the "data" I've created or collected over the years. My computer, for someone else, is not so much a repository of my life's experiences as it is a tool they can use themself to hold their own memories.

Will we lose our history as a society because of this? For the average person, whose collections of papers would often wind up in libraries or museums as examples of their way of life, will we disappear in the future because everything is on computers now? Will historians of the future actually have a harder time digging into our lives because it's all in bits and bytes, easily erased or overwritten by the next generation?

For the current generation, growing up typing and hardly being able to write longhand, there will be no pleasant afternoons spent poring over the old letters they forgot they had, no dusty old photo albums being dragged out. I just dont believe it will ever be the same once the paper generations are gone.

Then again, being from the paper generation, how could I imagine any other way but my own could ever be as special.