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Once, children sat for portraits, or appeared in home movies shot by adults; now they author their own narratives through selfies and posts on platforms like TikTok.
HO gets to tell their own story in the age of social media? What are the consequences
of such stories being shared? How will digital media transform the ways we remember and are remembered, now and in times to come? Will old deeds, old relationships, and our own former selves become inescapable thanks to new technologies and the capitalist frameworks in which they are deployed? Kate Eichhorn’s The End of Forgetting explores these questions with particular attention to their effect on children and young people. A professor at the New School for Social Research, she works at the intersection of cultural studies, media studies, and feminist theory. Eichhorn recognises that moral panics over media aren’t new. Parents, educators, and politicians have fretted over everything from comic books to cinema and colour TV, as new technologies arise and are designated as threats to a mythic “childhood innocence.” She points out that this myth “empties children of any thoughts of their own, stripping them of their own political agency and social agendas so that they become vehicles for adult needs, desires, and politics.” “Won’t somebody think of the children?” goes the cry, while a particular agenda is advanced and children themselves lack any true voice.
New era
Eichhorn’s concern is, instead, a progressive one; she notes this new era is significant precisely because children have been granted unprecedented agency in their own self-representation, bringing opportunity and danger. Once, children sat for portraits, or appeared in home movies shot by adults; now they author their own narratives through selfies and posts on platforms like TikTok. The forerunner to this turning point came before the digital
January-February 2024
age, with Kodak’s Brownie camera – but today’s devices offer young people ever greater liberty to tell and share their own stories.
Once told, however, can those stories be safely forgotten – or will they linger online? Eichhorn compares today’s youth to child celebrities, who in adulthood were often unable to escape their younger screen personas. A particular inequality arises for those with special reasons for “bracketing off of one’s past”, including queer youth leaving intolerant communities, people shamed for growing up poor, and those who seek to outgrow the risk-taking, exploratory, and often embarrassing period of adolescence.
Digital storage The End of Forgetting reminds of the generational difference between those who have grown up in the digital era versus those whose childhoods were only documented in analogue form. Previously, we could sequester photographs in the attic, or even destroy them with our bare hands, if we didn’t wish them to circulate.
“While young people may still covertly attempt to delete photographs of themselves from their parents’ and grandparents’ mobile phones, tablets, and computers,” Eichhorn writes, “that act is in no way akin to ripping a photograph out of an album and tossing it into the fireplace.”
Now, it is nearly impossible to know whether a digital image is gone for good – something that is even more true as cloud storage becomes more prevalent and even purging a device may not be enough to liberate us from an unwanted past.
We have been complicit, albeit unwittingly, in bringing this state of affairs about. “There was a time,” Eichhorn reminds us, “when people thought it was a really good idea to scan all your photographs, tag them, and save all the space – but you’d also be able to share them with so many more people than the album on your bookshelf.
Matt Finch (@drmattfinch) is a writer and consultant who specialises in strategy, foresight, and innovation work with institutions worldwide. See more at
www.mechanicaldolphin.com
They had no sense of what they might be contributing to.”
Even if we desist, the dilemma is almost inescapable for many now – between automated facial recognition and the capacity for others to tag them online. This removes the possibility of creating a “comfortable, if not complete distance between their present life and their past life”.
“People who have never had the privilege of romanticising home – those whose survival may even depend on taking leave and putting some distance between the present and the past – seem likely to be more at risk of ending up on the losing side of this technological equation,” Eichhorn writes.
Stockpiling data
As technologies continue to advance, and issues such as automated retrospective recognition and tagging of figures in the archive come into play, it is not only our present which becomes subject to potential search and scrutiny: it is our past. The prospects for positive change currently look bleak. “Certainly in the United States,” Eichhorn says, “things change because there’s a monetary value. And I just do not see a way out, unless we can imagine a way to make as much money through forgetting as we did through stockpiling all of our personal data.” IP
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