Lost Memories

[This is an archived blog item written in January 2018, when I was working at 44 Communications.]

Our Innovation Manager Tom Ives lost his online memories, which made him worry about the cost of the convenience Facebook and Google provide us with. He concludes on what we can do about it.

When I was a student I used an innovative social network for clubbers called ‘dont stay in’. It was a great place to post pictures of your big night out – tagging your friends and keeping those good memories online. This was before Facebook existed.
I made friends via the site, I connected with DJs I liked, and later I used the website to promote the gigs I ran with my friends to other clubbers who were into the music. Dontstayin.com was both location and genre segmented – creating concentrated communities of like minded people. Good times with friends and first encounters with future partners were captured on the site, a narrative across my four years at university in Birmingham.
12 years on, I remembered it and hit the URL to take a trip down memory lane.
It was gone – the business had been sold, a new site replacing it. I had no other archive – all my pics and memories were gone. I was gutted.

Not long afterwards I needed to find the date when I went on holiday eight years ago. I went straight to Facebook, found the pics of me on the beach and looked at the date I posted. I haven’t used Facebook much in the last two years certainly not to post – I took the app off my phone. Amidst my newsfeed of nonsense one of the few things I still like is when timehop reminds me what happened six, eight or ten years ago.
Like my search for holiday pics it transports me back to a diary I made of how I felt, where I went, what I ate and who I talked to. And it fascinates me – I’ve forgotten the fine detail but I’ve also forgotten why I felt so comfortable to broadcast the trivia of my life on Facebook. I’m very reticent to do so in 2018. I kept my distant friends and family in touch with my first daughters every goofy grin, but I want my second daughter to have some privacy – for her early years to not be in Facebook’s ad targeting database. Consequently my network barely see her progress through crawling, walking and learning to talk. In five years time I wont have much to look back on 2018 and reminisce. And that’s really sad.
What is more sad and shocking was my realisation that like Dontstayin.com at some point Facebook too will go away, or at least it’s free and unlimited catalogue of memories I enjoy.

What can we do?

When I heard the quote ‘if the service is free, you are the product’ it instantly made sense of these troubling feelings I have. Google Mail, Facebook Linked In and others are so wonderfully convenient and ubiquitous that we take them utterly for granted – not recognising how expensive and complex they are for their businesses to provide to us. And we are hooked – not just by our laziness, but by the real life connections that are enabled through the medium.
So what can we do? Is it too late to try and take back our memories – or just too hard work? I had a look around and realised my Amazon Prime account has unlimited photo storage. OK I’m equally uneasy with how Amazon indexes my family life in order to recognise our faces. But at least I’m paying for the service – as a customer can I expect my files persist a bit longer? And my pics aren’t in the public eye anymore. Apple’s iCloud is great value for storage and the ecosystem across my phone, tablet and computer is silky smooth. But I don’t want to be locked into the Apple ecosystem anymore than I already am. I’m not even going to look into running an email client on a server I run and pay for myself.
My personal favourite solution is wonderfully analogue. The creation of a photo book of just the very best holiday memories, along with the most sentimental captions has been surprisingly enjoyable and I guarantee it’ll persist on my book shelf.