83. Trace memories

The jet lag from the trip has finally worn off. It feels like a long time that I was away.

I still get the occasional flashback to the phone snatch moment I wrote about in #82. It still replays in my mind like a bad dream. And I keep thinking through what digital memories are now lost forever - each replay uncovers a small sliver of something else that is unrecoverable. This piece on the effect of digital ubiquity on memory and loss by Noga Arikha is a lovely read.

“Yet we continue creating our « digital memories », so clean, so free of historical dust. We are all hoarders now. Each of us, alone with our digital devices, is engulfed in a vast world belied by the small screen. Our smartphones are, quite extravagantly, our cameras. Words and images have become entwined, a return of the imprese of the Renaissance: motto and image aligned to make a point about ourselves, or the world, or our place in it. Record-keeping has become a lived life’s parallel activity. I would even venture that we (I included) obfuscate with picture-taking our melancholy inability fully to inhabit the perpetually fleeting, complex, ungraspable present.”