Digital Memory Quotes

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

My father has a book where, ever since I started playing games... he wrote down the games that I played in. And then, when I did my website, we thought that was a really good idea, that people can keep track of my games.

if it's not in my email archive, I don't know it

But the internet had changed everything: nobody was forgotten anymore.

I am living in the Google years, no question of that. And there are advantages to it. When you forget something, you can whip out your iPhone and go to Google. The Senior Moment has become the Google moment, and it has a much nicer, hipper, younger, more contemporary sound, doesn't it? By handling the obligations of the search mechanism, you almost prove you can keep up.... You can't retrieve you life (unless you're on Wikipedia, in which case you can retrieve an inaccurate version of it).

If we lose our phones, we lose our phone books. You don't memorize numbers anymore.

I love documenting. Having these videos forever is priceless to me, so I think I will be doing it forever, but who knows if YouTube is gonna be around forever.

We can now with Google Glasses record everything around us, and we can make sure that nothing is ever forgotten because everything is stored somewhere in Google servers or somewhere else.

Instagram is amazing, and I enjoy sharing photos there. However, I don't think it is where my photos will go to live.

Our kids will never have to remember things, because it's all in pictures. Want to remember your fourth birthday? There'll be video of it on your phone.

'The cloud' is effectively an augmentation of our brains' memories.

With our blogs and tweets, digital cameras, and unlimited-gigabyte e-mail archives, participation in the online culture now means creating a trail of always present, ever searchable, unforgetting external memories that only grows as one ages.

When I climb into my car, I enter my destination into a GPS device, whose spatial memory supplants my own. I have photographs to store the images I want to remember, books to store knowledge and now, thanks to Google, I rarely have to remember anything more than the right set of search terms to access humankind's collective memory.

Media cycles end, but the Internet never forgets. This is a valuable lesson, especially for college students.

Where past generations had film cameras, scrapbooks, notebooks, and that part of the brain which stores memories, we now have a smartphone app for every conceivable recording need. The thing is, all that time you spend logging and then curating the quotidian aspects of your daily life is time taken away from actually doing things.

If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.

With the Internet, if you erase something it just means you have to spend another half-minute to find it.

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

Never have lives less lived been more chronicled.

For many of us, our smartphones have become extensions of our brains - we outsource essential cognitive functions, like memory, to them, which means they soak up much more information than we realize.

You go to a Japanese restaurant and have a wonderful dish, and the thing to do is take a picture with your phone, put it on Facebook, and see how many likes you get. If you don't share your experiences, they don't become part of the data processing system, and they have no meaning.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

The velocity and volume on the Web are so great that nothing is forgotten and nothing is remembered.

I think writing is an act of remembrance, I think that Instagram is an act of remembrance, and I think curating a show is an act of memory, too.

Your next SMS will probably be around longer, and remain more legible, than your tombstone. For, unlike your tombstone or even your mortal coil, your texts may be worth something.