Future Tense
By TEDDY WAYNE
In “The Entire History of You,” the third episode of the dystopian BBC series “Black Mirror,” humans have developed implanted memory “grains” that record everything they see and hear. When users “redo” a memory by playing it back, the recreation even surpasses the original; they can zoom in on details or activate a lip-reading function to decipher unheard speech.
I thought of the episode when a friend showed me some pictures and videos of his two young children. There is more visual documentation of his kids from the last couple of months than of my entire childhood in the ’80s and ’90s. They’re growing up in a world far closer to one of grains and redos.
See More »
I have, certainly, a wealth of memories from preadolescence. But very few, if any, match up with photos I have seen. If there is a picture of me at a birthday party, it’s a good bet that I have no independent memory of being there. The disjunction may be a coincidence; after all, there are infinite moments to potentially remember and a finite number of photos capturing them. Or it could be that these photos I have seen over the years — my static, analog redos — have pushed out my own recollections.
–
Teddy Wayne is the author of the novels “The Love Song of Jonny Valentine” and “Kapitoil.” Follow him on Twitter.
Future Tense appears monthly.
A version of this article appears in print on February 22, 2015, on page ST2 of the New York edition with the headline: Memory, Foiled Again. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
Go to Home Page »
