long, slow, hard path of rational reconstruction, but the shortcut ‘that is travelled with the power and velocity of electricity, the road of the imagination that suddenly grasps the truth, in a split second, the moment it comes into contact with archaeological remains without relating it to anything’.15 Suddenly, past and present find themselves mixed together, making it particularly difficult to distinguish clearly between the two. We see this when a user chooses an old photo as their current profile picture. The comments written by followers on the day in which it was originally shared merge with those written later, causing them to become confused. More often than not the consequences of this are equally odd. For example, it could be that beneath the image of a woman are comments from both her current husband and her ex (unless he has been blocked), both of which refer to her as if she were their wife. Only a close inspection of the date in which the post was originally shared by the reader avoids any suspicion of polygamy.
On 13 June 2018 there was a passage from On This Day to Memories that was as decisive as it was emblematic. While On This Day offered the user a single post shared on the same date of a different year, Memories (www.facebook.com/memories) is a parallel timeline included in the Explore section, where all the posts shared on each day of all past years are collated. Memories wholeheartedly adopt ‘the simple mystery of concomitance’ that Roland Barthes attributes to photography, believing the date the photo was taken to be an integral part of its whole. The date does not denote a style, but ‘it makes me lift my head, allows me to compute life, death, the inexorable extinction of the generations’.16 The Memories section does not perhaps aspire to such heights. However, its objective is clear from the moment in which it greets us with the words: ‘We hope that you enjoy looking back on your memories on Facebook, from the most recent memories to those long ago’ [my italics]. Scrolling back through the wall, we find everything we have shared on any given day laid out in descending order. On 25 February 2019, I click on Memories and immediately discover that I shared two photographs on the same day in 2018: one depicting my city, Turin, blanketed in snow by the arrival in Italy of the freezing Siberian wind named ‘Burian’ by enthusiastic meteorologists, and the other showing a ticket for the Nirvana concert I went to as a teenager on 25 February 1994 in Milan, in the venue that used to be called the Palatrussardi. Ticket number: 8211. Cost: 32,000 lire. That was the Seattle grunge band’s penultimate ever concert, as Kurt Cobain committed suicide just a month and half later. This event was therefore relevant from both a personal perspective and an historical one. Moving down the page, I re-read two of my posts: the first, dated 25 February 2017, refers to the faltering political situation in Italy at that precise moment, while the second, dated 25 February 2016, contains a number of personal considerations of a vaguely existential nature (not purposefully so) on the passing of time. The subject shared with my followers the previous year was somewhat lighter: a piece of dark chocolate eaten at 1am. Going even further back, I discover that in 2013, a friend who lives in Finland had written a post on my wall notifying me he was going to a heavy metal concert, knowing how much of a fan I am. In 2012, I was tagged by another friend after an evening spent in San Salvario, an area of Turin famous for its nightlife. And so on, all the way to my first ever 25 February post on Facebook: that from 2009. Once this journey back through the personal memories of that day has come to an end, close friendships from past years are listed alongside special videos or collages celebrating new contacts. Significant events from the user’s personal life are then listed, regardless of whether or not they happened that day: the anniversary of a wedding or a graduation, or the start of a new job. The ‘looking back’ ends with a succinct: ‘That’s all for today.’ Anyone can go into Memories to re-share one or more of these memories, making them current in the same way as On This Day. When there are no posts shared on that day, Facebook points this out and invites the user to check the next day or perhaps activate specific notifications for memories so that none are missed.
The invention of the Memories section, according to Facebook’s product manager, Oren Hod, is justified by the fact that around ninety million people use On This Day each day, using the social network to relive experiences that are long gone, and therefore revive their own past. As a consequence, the creation of Memories provides all users with a dedicated place for their personal memories that allows them to consult these easily and intuitively without having to scroll through the hundreds or thousands of posts shared over the years. It would seem, then, that as far as ninety million people are concerned, it is not enough simply to tell the story of their past to themselves.
These numbers allow us to predict that Facebook in a not-too-distant future will create its own universal database of memories, which could be consulted using a simple single-word search. In this way Facebook will make definitive use of key word indexing (introduced in 2013) with a view to analysing our shared posts, looking for correlations, recurrent themes and anomalies in the lives recorded within it. Despite the inherent difficulty posed by managing such a vast level of content, this prediction is corroborated by the presence of a system that allows every user to make single searches by year, month and day within their own profile and those of their contacts. All they need to do is head to the ‘Activity Log’ section and select the year and month of interest, highlighting the shared posts, images and links to be recovered. In addition to this there is a ‘Stories’ archive that is easy to search and that can be downloaded onto the user’s computer. The ‘Stories’, used by both Facebook and Instagram, initially seem to prove Samantha right. They are, indeed, temporary ways of sharing photographs, videos and written texts. They stay visible for 24 hours after which time they delete themselves, just as happens with Snapchat content. Their objective is the creation of a kind of live streaming of our very existence, meaning immediacy, instantaneousness and the avoidance of recording are their fundamental prerogatives. However, the collective desire to preserve them and revive them whenever we wish has pushed those in charge at Facebook and Instagram to create a specific space that overwhelmingly downsizes the carpe diem inherent in these platforms.
Facebook even allows users to download the entirety of the digital life they have lived within its labyrinthine workings. If you visit the profile section on information, accessed from the general Settings page, you find a way of archiving all that content on your own computer: posts, photos, video, likes and reaction, friends, stories, messages, groups and so on. The download can include both single publications, once the type of information and desired timeframe have been selected, and the entire collection of documents. It is possible to choose between a HTML format, which is easier to view, and the JSON format that allows for another service to import the data immediately. This download, which involves a substantial amount of time for those profiles that have been particularly active over the years, is password-protected and only the account user is able to access it. It also only exists for a limited amount of time before it is automatically deleted. Alternatively, in the case of the user’s death (though only if they have previously given permission) this can be accessed by a legacy contact. Once the friend’s death has been certified, the legacy contact can carry out the download and archive a copy of the deceased’s profile and all its contents (excluding private messages) on their own computer. Thus, the digital memory carefully constructed by the deceased during their time on Zuckerberg’s social network will be preserved forever.
From the video celebrating the year that is about to end, to impromptu hashtags such as #10YearChallenge, to On This Day and Memories, arriving at the copy in a single file of all of your digital memories produced on Facebook over the years, Zuckerberg seems to make his own, albeit optimistically, the unnerving thought expressed by Mark Fisher: ‘in conditions of digital recall loss is itself lost’.17 Thanks to digital technology, the recollections buried in our memory today have the possibility of being disinterred at any moment in our daily life and brought back to life, once more achieving that same actuality that had characterized them when they had first been experienced.
This book, developing the reflections on Digital Death made in Online Afterlives, aims to analyse the philosophical consequences of this digital unearthing of memories for our way of remembering and forgetting, shining a light on the parallel effects of the past’s gradual emancipation from control by the present. In order to do this, it is necessary first to revisit those fundamental
