Posed by the newest video in the PBS Idea Channel series (above), it’s a good question. Facebook has almost a billion users, storing on the site some 250 million photos daily, archiving a past (of sorts) along a neat timeline. In an idealized world, we’re arguably changing how we sort and store memory; we don’t forget, memories don’t fade. You’ve heard this before. Memory, the past, is crucial for how we form our idea of ourselves in the present. So then, is all of this archiving and instant, perfect recall changing who we actually are now in the present?That’s the question and the video seems pretty into the “yes” answer and the notion that that’s a good thing. But it’s also a pretty ridiculous generalization, not taking into account that Facebook use is hardly uniform — a billion people aren’t sharing and archiving their past a la scrapbooks or brain matter — and that Facebook or any proper noun probably should be avoided in the discussion because what we’re really talking about is the power of digital storage to keep whatever forever and make it instantly accessible. You could say that Facebook was even a late-comer to the wonderland of cloud-based storage.As for the question … maybe? The ability to preserve images like this is neat, but the actual brain structures and networks that determine memory recall aren’t going to be touched by Facebook anytime soon, and the way in which we recall things with our brains, how memories (many more than Facebook or anything can dream of) are prioritized (or discarded) and connected (and interpreted, of course), has just as much to do with the nature of memory (and so identity) as the memories themselves. So far, technology can barely touch this; a photo uploaded online doesn’t behave in any way like an image plugged into your brain.Good question, but optimistic to the point of meaninglessness.
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