Random Access Memories

Our reliance on our phone cameras for brain space, validation, and recordkeeping.

#612, Fidenza 2021, Tyler Hobbs.

On a daily basis, humans currently take about 5.3 billion photos per day. The vast majority, about 94% of these photos, are taken on our smartphones. With every passing year since the invention of these pocketable two-in-one phones and cameras, we have increased our global photo taking by about 6 to 8% each year.(1) What does this do to our collective memories and what does our reliance upon our phones as records of existence change about the fabric of society? 

If you were to survey your friends and family about their photo taking habits, many might balk at the admission – what number is “normal” to have on your camera roll? At what point do you seem crazy on either end of the spectrum – the one end where you barely take photos and thus are the oddball out in a documenting obsessed zeitgeist, or the other end of the spectrum where you take so many photos that people can’t help but think of you as self-obsessed and a cog in the social media machine? It seems that our camera rolls reveal something deeper about ourselves before we even open them. 

I recently spent the past week diligently deleting thousands of photos off my phone in order to make space for a new update, something I’ve had to do multiple times in my life as I, clearly, have a tendency to hoard images. The photos I deleted still live on in my computer, aside from a few recent useless screenshots or minimizing down on near-identical photos in the form of selfies or travel photos, so they’re not gone forever but rather gone from immediate and easy access. It feels good to clear out the object that I carry with me daily and now can hopefully use to reference points in my life when I bring them up in conversation without getting lost in a sea of random photos, breathlessly telling the person I’m talking to that “I’m almost there, I can feel it, just let me scroll and search a bit more!”

In doing this task, which felt at times daunting, taxing, boring, emotional, and even embarrassing, I started to view the smartphone camera roll as a modern day point of anthropological study. Now, more than ever before in human history, it is easier to create records of our day to day lives, from photos, to tweets, texts, notes app entries, and handwritten journals if you still keep one (I, of course, do), there are seemingly endless and immediate ways to memorialize our every move and thought. 

But as I scrolled through my camera roll, I found myself questioning the point of all this documentation if 1. I hardly ever referenced the photos as often I thought I would and 2. What effect it was having on my long-term memory given how little I seemed to organically remember about my life until prompted by the images. Was all this photo taking actually resulting in a total nullification of memory rather than a supplementation, where I don’t live in the moment enough to deeply encode it in my long-term memory and where I don’t look at the photo enough for it to be truly useful? 

Two psychological studies about the effects of photo taking and memory can help us parse these questions. In the first study, researchers found that when museum goers were prompted to take photos of certain artworks as a whole but only observe others, they tended to remember fewer objects and fewer details about the objects of the artworks they photographed. This was called the photo-taking impairment effect. However, the same study also found that when museum goers were prompted to zoom in and photograph specific details of an artwork, their memory of the photographed details and the non-photographed details was higher than when they had photographed the whole artwork and comparable to when they had only observed the artwork. Meaning that when participants were directed to focus their attention, their recall abilities were higher than if they were unfocused. However, in both those experiments, the participants who took photos had lower recall abilities regarding the location of the artworks they had seen. It seems that there is always a trade off going on between not only what we are remembering, but how detailed those memories are.(2)

The second study found that when people took photos in a museum out of their own volition - meaning they choose what and how to photograph things - their recall of what they photographed was higher than those who did not take any photos, however, their auditory recall was lower. In this case, it seems that the shifting of attention towards photographing objects in turn shifts our memory to visual aspects and away from auditory aspects. The study also purports that because the photos were not accessed when the participants were being tested, they were not using the photos as a way to “offload” their memory, rather, intentional photo-taking seems to enhance memory effects of the photographed objects.(3)

What do we make of this? Personally, I can’t help but admit that unless I regularly look back at my camera roll, I genuinely tend to forget many of the things I did in a month, especially the exact dates they happened. When catching up with long distance friends I will have to scroll through my camera roll either before or during the call to jog my memory. This separation from my own life creates a feeling of eerie disconnection – if I rely upon my little screenbox for memory support at the young age of 25, what am I going to be doing when I’m 70 and trying to explain my 20’s to my grandchildren? What will be the events that encode in my long term memory and will I be satisfied with the ones chosen? 

A couple weeks have passed since I first started thinking about writing this essay and as a result my relationship to photo taking and my phone has already, miraculously, shifted. It is possibly one of the fastest changes I have adopted and plan to keep up for the foreseeable future. Rather than snapping a bunch of photos and hoping for the best or screenshotting things haphazardly never to be found again, I treat my phone almost as if it’s a digital camera. I take fewer photos, but they are all much more intentional and “photographic” — i.e. better framing, composition, light, etc — and in the case that I do take more than a handful of photos, I go back in, chopping block in hand. I no longer have an obsession with holding onto every snap, relishing in the candid quality that it captured, but rather choose to have a select few that can capture a moment well enough for my memory to be jogged but not so many that I feel it being totally supplanted.

In an age that feels so desperate to validate our existence by a digital presence – refer to every Instagram post captioned “proof of life” with a hodgepodge photo dump – it feels like a breath of fresh air to negate this desire to photograph every minutia of our day, from every angle in every light. Maybe I’ll snap a photo of the flower on my walk, or maybe I’ll make a mental note of it, appreciating it for its ephemeral nature and be reminded of the passage of time and the impermanence of all things when I go on another walk in the future and see that it has reached the end of its season and will begin its cycle anew. 

Memory is a landscape with changing seasons, blistering winds, erosion, snow, and constant change. What remains is not always up to us but we can tend the fields as we see fit, adding a little more water here and a little less fertilizer there, remembering that pruning is essential if we hope to have room for new blossoms.

References

1. Broz, M. (2022, February 17). How Many Photos Are There? 50+ Photos Statistics (2022). Photutorial.com. https://photutorial.com/photos-statistics/

2. Henkel, Linda. (2013). Point-and-Shoot Memories: The Influence of Taking Photos on Memory for a Museum Tour. Psychological science. 25. 10.1177/0956797613504438.

3. ‌Barasch, A., Diehl, K., Silverman, J., & Zauberman, G. (2017). Photographic Memory: The Effects of Volitional Photo Taking on Memory for Visual and Auditory Aspects of an Experience. Psychological science, 28(8), 1056–1066. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617694868