This chapter originally appeared in the 2013 book “Meaning and Memory: Digital Differences”, first published by the Inter-Disciplinary Press.

Blended Memory: the Changing Balance of Technologically-mediated Semantic and Episodic Memory

Tim Fawns

AbstractUbiquitous technologies are leading us to be less selective when capturing, reviewing, and sharing details of the events in our lives. Reviewing digital photos has been shown to help the reinforcement of autobiographical memory. However, we need to know more about the type of memory experience these practices lead to. Accessing too much recorded detail about past events could lead our minds to engage less fully in the construction of memory, avoiding episodic experience by short-cutting to semantic knowledge. External memory has always been crucial to our memory process and our growing digital memories bring with them great potential advantages. Technology should, however, be designed to complement our minds rather than to replace them. Increased distance from our own experience through a failure to invoke episodic memory may lead to detachment from our own memories and, consequently, from our sense of self and from others. This chapter introduces the term ‘blended memory’ to conceptualise the balance of internal (biological) and external (physical, digital or communal) memory, then uses digital photography as a focus for speculating on how changes to this balance might impact on the way we view our past, present and future.

Key Words: Memory, technology, episodic, semantic, selectivity, effort, reflection, digital photos.

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1. IntroductionDigital technology is changing the way we capture, store, review and share

details of the events in our lives. Digital cameras, for example, allow us to take hundreds, or even thousands, of photos at minimal cost. They allow us to review photos immediately and retake unsatisfactory ones. We are printing fewer photos, viewing them instead on computer screens, mobile phones and other devices. Websites such as Flickr and Facebook allow us to instantly send our photos to large groups of people. Add to this the rate at which personal information is expanding in our email accounts, social-networking sites and mobile devices, and a picture begins to form of a social memory similar to what Jung called our ‘collective unconscious’. 1

Our growing digital memory stores bring with them great potential advantages. We can bridge the gap between remote family members and friends by showing

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them the changes in ourselves, our children and our surroundings. We can access large banks of global knowledge, as well as minute details about our lives that would have been lost in the pre-digital era. Alongside these benefits, however, is a concern that we are becoming less selective about what we capture, store, review and share. In the case of photography, where the expense and limited storage capacity of photographic film once forced us to make considered decisions about what we chose to capture, we can now shoot hundreds of photos before further action is required. Instead of organising printed photos into physical albums, we are more likely to copy digital photos to a computer, perhaps without even looking at them, particularly if we are overwhelmed by the magnitude of our collections. 2 Sharing memory artefacts (such as photos or videos) via the Internet or email can reduce our engagement in the co-construction of memory narratives as compared to when we talk about them with others in physical, face-to-face settings.3

All of this points to a reduction in effort, selectivity and reflection when encoding and consolidating memory with the help of artefacts. This chapter argues that, through a lack of reflection on our use of digital technologies, we may be reducing the depth of our engagement with memory practices while retaining too much detail about our lives that would otherwise be forgotten. There are two important consequences of this. Firstly, we are spreading our attention too thinly across too many cues to our memory, potentially changing the balance of memory away from rich experience and toward surface knowledge of ourselves. Secondly, it may be more difficult to effectively develop identity if we are less selective about what we choose to assimilate and what we discard.

The following section discusses the relationship between memory and identity, highlighting the importance of memory malleability in the construction of our sense of self.

2. The nature of memoryThis chapter is mostly concerned with those conscious traces of our past we call

declarative memory (i.e. facts and experiences).4 This kind of memory is central to our existence in that it allows us to make connections between our past, present and future.5 Every time we recall an experience, we change the nature of the memory, reconstructing it based on stored information.6 Hassabis and Maguire describe this process as scene construction: ‘the process of mentally generating and maintaining a complex and coherent scene or event’.7 According to this model of memory, we retrieve encoded information relevant to the ‘scene’ of the experience. We can think of this retrieved information as anchor points which we connect via constructed imagery. Over time, the subsequent retrieval of this constructed imagery leads to Schacter's ‘sin of transience’ or the distortion of remembered details.8

In 1972, Endel Tulving characterised two distinct systems relating to declarative memory: the semantic and episodic systems.9 In evolutionary terms, the

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semantic system probably developed first, with the episodic system developing relatively recently.10 Episodic memory also develops later in childhood than does semantic, and the episodic system seems to be dependent on a functional semantic memory.11 Both are vital to our capacity to act and think as humans.

Episodic memory is concerned with traces of our experienced events. Recall is characterised by the subjective re-experience of an event, including an awareness of the sense that it is you remembering your personal experience (or ‘autonoetic awareness’), as well as a sense of the time and space in which the event originally happened.12 To achieve episodic recall, one must be autonoetically aware at both the time of encoding and retrieval. This awareness depends on autonoetic consciousness: the capacity for self-awareness and the feeling of being present within the relevant moment as an entity separate from the environment.13,14

Elements of experience can also be stored in semantic memory, but these differ from those stored in episodic memory in that they contain only the details of what happened, not the subjective, personal connection to those details.15 To illustrate this difference between the two memory systems, picturing (mentally re-experiencing) a visit to a restaurant in Paris would require accessing episodic memory, whereas thinking of the name of the street it was on might only require semantic memory.

Semantic memory is impersonal and detached, but it is faster and easier to access than episodic memory. Therefore, if we have enough semantic details on hand to solve a problem, we may choose to avoid the extra effort of re-experiencing a memory.16 In this way, semantic memory can act as a heuristic device for episodic content, increasing efficiency but decreasing emotional connection.17 For example, if we see a lion, we are able to recognise the danger it poses without remembering the events that led us to this knowledge, allowing us to react quickly to the situation. However, semantic memory can also approximate episodic memory since it is possible to construct episodic-like narratives that are based on semantic autobiographical information.18 Such narratives may give the impression that the narrator can remember the subjective qualities of the experience even if he or she is simply accessing knowledge of the details of the experience.

Episodic recollection, in particular, is thought to have many potential benefits such as improving self esteem, aiding the construction of identity and goal-systems,19 and enhancing the ability to connect socially with others.20 To illustrate the importance of this type of memory, we can look at patients with frontal lobe damage that is believed to be associated with impairments in autonoetic consciousness and episodic memory.21 Such patients have been shown to lack self-reflection and, in some cases, despite awareness of their cognitive deficits, to also lack concern at their condition. This is consistent with the inability to connect semantic knowledge (that they have a cognitive impairment) to their own, subjective situation.22 People with Autism Spectrum Disorder or Alzheimer's

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Disease are also thought to have impaired capacity for episodic recall, leading to problems in social interaction and the ability to anticipate future possibilities. 23,24

Episodic memory appears to be more malleable than semantic memory.25 In episodic memory, as in our fantasies, our dreams and our projections of the future, we use imagination to create an internal representation of the world. 26 This internal representation is susceptible to suggestion from external influences. Just as dreams, for example, are responsive to external stimuli such as the noise of an alarm clock, our memories have been shown to be susceptible to ideas, preconceptions and external evidence.

One important example of this was shown by a swathe of recent studies, prompted by developments in DNA evidence, that pointed to a series of wrongful convictions based on eyewitness testimony.27 These studies showed the fallibility of historical eyewitness procedures due to the effects on recall produced by leading questions (e.g. ‘Did you see a red Ford parked outside?’), choice of descriptors (e.g. ‘smashed’ vs ‘hit’ when asking about a collision between two cars) or by showing line-up suspects simultaneously rather than individually.28,29

Studies into false memory have shown that we can take the seed of an experience which did not happen and weave it into our existing memories and beliefs. For example, Elizabeth Loftus has shown that ‘many cases of allegedly recovered memories have turned out to be false memories implanted by well-meaning therapists who use suggestion and imagination to guide the search for memories.’30 Some participants were even convinced that they had experienced implausible events, such as meeting Bugs Bunny (a character owned by Warner Brothers, rather than Disney) at Disneyland.31 In another study, Loftus and colleagues showed that false memories can influence future behaviour when they found that those participants in whom they were able to introduce a false childhood memory of being sick after eating a hard-boiled egg, were more likely to avoid hard-boiled eggs in the future.32

A false memory's integrated appearance can be convincing because we construct complementary details to enhance its authenticity. Bernstein and Loftus also claim that researchers have started to compare the qualities of veridical memories with those of rich false memories, with few differences emerging.33 It seems that memory’s malleability is necessary to the development of our identities as we reconfigure our memories to be consistent with our current perspective.34 This allows us to make decisions based on how we feel and what we know now, rather than at some point in our past.

Given memory’s susceptibility to distortion, it is unsurprising that we turn to external objects to guide our recall. Along with supporting our memory processes, our artefacts have the power to alter not only what we remember, but the meaning we take from the resulting memories. The following section uses the case of digital photography to discuss the integration of internal and external memory.

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3. Blended MemoryThe term ‘blended memory’ is used here to conceptualise the balance of

internal (biological) and external (physical, digital or communal) memory. External memory has always been crucial to our memory process. For many centuries, we have distributed our knowledge by speaking to other people or writing our thoughts on paper. Our capacity to operate as humans is dependent on our ability to manipulate our environment via tools and technologies. Marshall McLuhan famously wrote that ‘The wheel is an extension of the foot, the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin, electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.’35 Our computers, cameras, phones, pens and paper are extensions of our overall personal and cultural memory systems. Blended memory is a natural progression from our inherent tendency to enter into what philosopher Andy Clark calls ‘deep and complex relationships with nonbiological constructs, props and aids.’36

The characteristics of our media and their associated tools strongly influence our perceptions of the information they mediate and, therefore, the meaning we take from our interaction with them. Alongside helping us to remember our experiences, artefacts alter the view we have of ourselves and our world in often subtle yet significant ways.37 For example, language - a cognitive artefact - gives us rules that simplify the expression and interpretation of ideas. The tools used for communication further restrict our use of language. Speech, for example, is constrained through choices of intonation, accent and timing. Writing is constrained by alphabets and by the eloquence of the writer. Email is further constrained by its interface - the keyboard, the fonts, the subject field, signatures, etc. Far from impeding us, these constraints help us to understand each other by narrowing the range of potential meanings.

Only certain information persists through the process of mediation. Smell, touch and taste, for example, are lost in a video. Sound is lost in a photo, as are aspects of any scene that are not visible within the frame of the lens. Other information is altered. For example, taking a photograph of my cat and uploading it to Facebook does not allow my friends to see my cat, as such. Instead, it allows them to see a single representation of my cat, captured at a particular angle at a particular instant in time. This representation is mediated through my camera’s lens and software, then through Facebook’s software, then through my friend’s web browser, computer (or phone, or iPad, etc.) and the pixels on the screen.

Each of our four key memory practices (capturing, storing, retrieving and sharing) is altered through interaction with artefacts. Using digital photography as our focus, these changes are explored in the next section, including the challenges we face in maintaining authentic engagement with our memories.

A. Capturing

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The practice of capturing, here, refers to the processes involved when we take a photograph. Each time we take a photo of an experience, it alters the experience by making the situation somewhat contrived.38 Imagine, for example, that I decide to take a photograph at a dinner party to capture the convivial atmosphere. Despite this atmosphere having developed through natural and spontaneous interaction, I call this interaction to a halt and ask everyone to move into positions they would not have occupied during the experience other than for the purpose of being photographed. People are arranged according to height, asked to move closer to the centre, to stop talking and to smile. People who were in other rooms are asked to leave what they were doing and stand in the frame of the picture so that the whole event can be summarised in a photograph that implies a social comfort and group cohesion which may or may not really exist. Perhaps there is one person who fails in their task of posing (for example, by looking at something other than the camera) because they are more attentive to the social experience itself than to the project of creating a representation of it. This person may even be reprimanded for ‘ruining the picture’ as everyone is asked to remain in position for the next attempt. Even if we do not impose such formality on the scene, the presence of the camera creates a change in what is captured. Roland Barthes eloquently described the way in which the knowledge that a photo is being taken changes how we feel during the experience.39 This applies not just to those in the frame, but also to those behind the lens, an idea that should be particularly evident to anyone who has taken a photograph and then forgotten to look at the scene through their own eyes.

Although we are, to some extent, aware of the mediating nature of photography, we may cast blame on the environment before blaming the camera. Although we might say ‘it didn’t really look like that,’ we are as likely to blame environmental lighting for a poor photograph as we are the camera’s inability to represent such lighting (which was, after all, part of our experience of the environment in which the photo was taken). Equally, we may be aware that the photo does not contain certain important details, such as a friend who was outside (or, indeed, holding the camera), or that there is no photograph of a particular important incident. Over time, however, we become less aware of such effects of mediation and we are likely to forget large parts of the event for which there is no external record. Thus, while photos are undoubtedly effective aids to the recall of episodic memory,40 they may distort the salience of particular aspects of an experience. This ‘levelling and sharpening’ process leads memories to become distorted by certain details becoming exaggerated (sharpened) as other details fade (levelled).41 Photographs encourage this process by showing us those elements of our experiences which happened to be captured by the camera (visual information that was present in the frame of the lens) and not showing us elements of the experience which happened not to be captured (sounds, smells, emotions, visual information outside the frame of the lens, or anything that happened before or after the click of the shutter).

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Barthes claimed that a photograph (at least, an analogue one that is created through the action of light on chemicals) proves that its referent elements (those details present in the image) have existed.42 Photography, however, shows us a contrived view of past existence, capturing only the space between two moments, only the view from the angle of the lens, and only the quality of colours and shapes determined by the camera's mechanics. Subjects and environment are often arranged to suit the photograph as we select which view of reality to attempt to capture based on the nature of our equipment and our abilities to use it. Dark, interior spaces, night-time events and rainy days are, consequently, doomed to be under-represented because we are happier photographing outdoor, sunny scenes.

Photographs are taken for various purposes. They might be taken for aiding our memory of an experience, for communication (e.g. ‘look what my child did today’), for artistic purposes (e.g. a macro shot of a bee on a sunflower) or for a combination of these. The purpose of any given photo may be unclear to both the photographer and the audience, and its subsequent use may be other than intended. A colleague recently said, ‘you take photographs that you're going to show people, but you don't. Or I don't, often, which is crazy, really. They're striking at the time.’ This statement implies that the perceived importance of a given photograph often fades over time, and we are unable to accurately predict what will be interesting to us in the future. It may be that this leads us to take more photographs than we will need, just in case the scene we are capturing turns out to be interesting to us at a later date. But to what extent does taking the photograph change the experience itself due to an assumption that we will use this footage in the future to help us remember the present?

Digital technology is undoubtedly changing the nature of photography. Until recently, most photographers used rolls of film which could hold 24 or 36 photos. Developing these photographs cost money and time. Due to the expense, photos were mostly taken at special events and holidays, and a roll of film might last two or three holidays. By contrast, digital cameras allow us to take hundreds of photos before any further action is required. We can avoid the cost of purchasing rolls of film and the cost of having them developed. As a consequence, we are less selective about what we capture, sometimes taking multiple photos of the same thing in an attempt to achieve the perfect representation. A consequence of being less selective with our photo-taking is a decreased investment in the decision-making around what aspects of an experience are most important to record. In the pre-digital era, having a limit to the number of photos we could reasonably take of an event helped us to consider, more closely, the relative value of the experiences we wished to capture.

B. StoringThe practice of storing involves the collation of our captured photos, deciding

which to keep and which to throw away, sorting them into categories and locations,

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and maintaining them in some sort of order. Photographs are one of our most precious possessions.43 Our collections of photos form an integral part of our personal histories and we derive comfort from the knowledge that we have them somewhere, even if we are not sure of their exact location. In the pre-digital era, photos were generally stored in albums or in boxes. As such, there were practical limits to how many photos we could keep. Sorting them into albums was a time-consuming job that helped us to be selective about which ones we chose to give more prominence and which were relegated to a box in a cupboard or attic. This process required thinking about organisational themes (e.g. a timeline of a particular person, family weddings, holidays, etc.). Photos and albums were labelled to varying extents, providing some ‘metadata’ for more efficient searching, or more detail to help cue memories about particular events.

With respect to pre-digital photos, the role of the family gatekeeper (the person who controlled access to the family’s archives), was most often a maternal figure who assumed responsibility for sorting and storing the photos and who, consequently, was the most likely person to know where to find them.44 The equivalent digital family archives are now more likely to be controlled by a paternal figure,45 based on knowledge of where to find the files on the home computer or on a web-based account.46 However, an increasing number of individual archives are now also being maintained (e.g. by younger people), and the owners of these are having to develop their own systems of storage and access control.47,48

Digital storage space is of little concern to most people due to expanding disk capacities and, although the amount of time we spend taking photos is increasing, there is evidence that the resulting files often remain unorganised on hard-disks or may even remain on the camera itself.49 Our reduction in selectivity when taking photos seems to be matched by a reduction in selectivity around which photos we choose to keep. The relative expense of deletion (as deleting photos becomes more time-consuming than creating them) is resulting in overwhelmingly large personal photograph collections.50

C. ReviewingThe practice of reviewing involves looking at the photographs we have

captured. Just as some mediation of reality is necessary for us to make sense of and operate in the world, some cueing is important for the retrieval of episodic memories. Reviewing photographs from our past helps to connect us with our memories of the related experiences.

In pre-digital times, after waiting for the developer to process our film, we would often receive a heavy envelope or two that we looked through immediately. Those overexposed or blurred photos that had not already been discarded by the developer could be thrown away. We would probably look through them again, perhaps with friends or family, when we returned home before processing them for

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storage. The next time we looked at them, they were generally either in sorted albums or unsorted boxes. Expanding digital photo collections are forcing us to change our reviewing practices. For one thing, it can be increasingly difficult to locate our images. In a study of reviewing practices of digital photo collections, the most frequent reason given by participants for retrieval difficulties was having too many pictures.51 This is exacerbated when collections have become spread across a number of devices.

Our vast collections make it more difficult for us to limit our reviewing to a select number of photos associated with a single theme. This is potentially problematic because deriving personal meaning from our artefacts requires us to attach associations to them from our internal memory.52 Effort and selectivity are likely to be essential to this process, since associations must be reinforced through mental re-experience.

Another factor which may disrupt meaning-making is the increasing tendency for subjective associations (created by humans) between events to be replaced by algorithms (created by technology) based on metadata filters. One example of this can be seen on platforms such as Facebook and Flickr which use search algorithms or tags to decide which photos to display. Another example of machine-based categorisation occurs when large numbers of photos are automatically copied into the same folder on a disk, resulting in an increased probability that they will be reviewed together. Both scenarios are a result of photos being connected via metadata (e.g. a tag on Flickr or a folder location on a hard drive) rather than via the subjective choices of their owners based on aspects of personal meaning.

It is clear that metadata influences how we retrieve memory artefacts. In his chapter of this book on Metadata and New Architectures of Memory, Carlos Falci gives us a striking example of how the website ‘We Feel Fine’ creates architectures of memory based on metadata. Often, such metadata is written by our media tools themselves, increasing the influence of mediation on the organisation and retrieval of memory artefacts. Metadata leads us to connect one experience to another not through subjective association but through the connections that are inherent in the digital data. Just as objects captured in a photo tend to assume a greater relative importance than those objects not captured, our memories can be distorted by metadata which over-emphasises particular aspects of an experience. In some cases, this may even lead to source misattribution, where the source of a memory is influenced by incorrect suggestion.53 For example, if a digital photograph is given an incorrect tag or description, or it is found in the wrong place, our associated memories may adapt to this false information. This is not to say that metadata is inherently negative - it can also help us to avoid misattribution, and is particularly important with large photo sets. For example, if we cannot remember when or where a particular photograph was taken, or whether or not it is even our photo, metadata can help us to contextualise it and recreate associations to other memories.

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While our biological memories distort over time, the information contained in memory artefacts seems to remain relatively stable. Because of this perceived resilience, we can become reliant on memory artefacts to verify our biological recall in the same way that people have become reliant on calculators and spell-checkers.54 As a result, the degradation experienced in our (unaided) mathematical and spelling skills may be replicated in our factual and episodic recall. As Loftus and Calvin have suggested, ‘We’ll rely more on digital storehouses full of video and audio files of our lives... because we also realize how unreliable human memory can be.’55

Although digital records help to increase the accuracy of our recall, accuracy is not necessarily the most important measure of memory. The value of a memory is also related to its meaningfulness to us (its perceived significance to our identity) and its usefulness to us (its potential for incorporation into goal-systems and decision-making). It may seem reasonable that more photos should lead to more accurate memories that are also more meaningful (given that they are closer to their corresponding reality) and more useful (given that they contain more real-world information that we can respond to), but such precision may reduce opportunities for reflection and interpretation. Each photo affords interpretation of the happenings before and after the frozen moment that has been captured, and the degree of interpretation afforded is affected by what other evidence is present (for example, in other photos). It may be that if there are a large number of photos showing other moments of an event, the affordance of interpretation is reduced, leaving us with less opportunity to extract subjective meaning from our experience.

D. SharingThe practice of sharing refers to those times when we present our photos to

other people. By sharing photographs with friends and family, we engage in the co-construction of memory narratives and perform an important part of the memory consolidation process.56 In the pre-digital era, when we returned home with our newly printed photos, there was often a sense of excitement as we showed them to those around us. Leafing through the sets of prints, stories would emerge and connections would be made with other events. Care would often be taken not to smudge the photos and, inevitably, their order would be altered by this interaction. At other times, photos were shared via albums, slideshows or as framed pictures. These interactions would generally take place in comfortable, social spaces such as living rooms.

Although remote sharing platforms such as Facebook now mean that we often share photos with people in far away places before we share them with those at home, digital photos also continue to be shared in co-present, face-to-face ways. In the age of desktop computers, this was not always a particularly rewarding experience with people crowding around a PC which was often located in a working space rather than a social space. Such environments are less conducive to

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reminiscence than more relaxed, social environments. In 2008, Nunes et al. found that printed photos, rather than those in digital form, were preferred for showing to others and for displaying around their home or office. 57 This may now be changing with the emerging popularity of aesthetic, portable devices such as tablet computers and smart phones which can be physically passed from one person to another in comfortable, social settings.

Remote sharing via online platforms creates a different social dynamic and results in a different co-construction of narrative around memory. These narratives often take the form of a series of temporally-dispersed comments from a varied audience, members of which may have had no previous contact with their fellow discussants.58 Such new practices of memory sharing are blurring the boundaries between individual and communal memory as we extract information from a variety of familiar or unknown sources. Unrestrained sharing of our personal memory artefacts (e.g. by making them publicly-accessible), could lead to detachment from our memories by reducing our ownership of them. This potential for detachment is illustrated by a quote from a featured student in ‘Class Pictures’, a book of portraits of US high school students: ‘[looking at my picture] feels strange because I am trying to extract a private memory from an image that is now public.’59

Transferring memory to the digital realm dissociates it from the place where the remembered experience occurred. Similarly, photographs (digital or chemical) ‘untie’ memory from the context in which it was created. When digital memories are distributed to multiple spaces, there may be a further decoupling from the original context. The increasing trend of photography as communicative memory (e.g. photos sent to communicate something new rather than as an aid to nostalgia) may be, as Falci points out in his chapter, leading to thematic instability and disorganised collections of memory objects. Through his exploration of memory sharing through technological interfaces, Falci provides more evidence that changing our memory practices alters the memories themselves by showing the significance of the context of remembrance. It seems, however, that we still attribute significant value to the source, if not the original context, of a photo. In the digital era, it is much easier to access other people’s photos, yet many of us still prefer to take our own rather than incorporate those of other people into our collections. While some people are happy to let others photograph an event with the understanding that photographs will subsequently be shared, it is rare for us to download the photos of strangers as a replacement for those we failed to take. In the case of tourist photos, such as of the Eiffel Tower, it would be easy to find a photo very similar to one we might have taken, including lighting conditions, weather, etc. But our photos are not just of a place: they are of a place at a specific time. They coincide with the exact time that we were there and are used to show not what it was like in Paris, but what it was like in Paris at the time I was there.

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Perhaps knowing that a photograph was taken at a time when we were not there undermines the meaning we might otherwise take from it.

4. Balancing Blended MemoryJust as our biological memories are prone to distortion, blended memory can be

affected by memory bias, disrupting the authenticity of the relationship between a memory artefact and our experience of the remembered event. Firstly, if we rely too heavily on digital artefacts, we risk constraining our recollection largely to information that is stored in our external archives. Adding metadata, such as tags or comments, may help retain some of the context of an event, but we remain unable to artificially retrieve associated memories or associated emotional or sensory information. These must be accessed through episodic memory, by cognitively reconstructing some part of the original experience. If we do not do this, distortion of our memory through levelling and sharpening may be exacerbated as certain details, present in our artefacts, become exaggerated while other, absent details fade.60

While large photo collections contain extensive arrays of memory cues that help us to remember many details of our lives, it is important to consider what kind of memory we are accessing. Technology should be designed to complement our minds rather than to replace them. Key, here, is the constructive, rather than reproductive, nature of our memories.61 Conway argues that to maintain a coherent sense of self, we need to align our past and our present identities by continuously reconstructing our memories.62 Does our knowledge of the existence of particular photos impede our development by pulling us back to events we would prefer to forget? Schacter wrote that ‘remembering the past more accurately or negatively can leave us discouraged’.63 Constructing our memories to suit our identity and view of the world allows us to forget those experiences that hinder our personal evolution. Having overly detailed records of our experience will change the way in which we are able to do this because our degrees of freedom will be reduced by having too many ‘anchor points’. When Mayer-Schonberger wrote that ‘through perfect memory we may lose a fundamental human capacity - to live and act firmly in the present,’ he described the potential for us to get stuck in redundant patterns of thinking due to exposure to evidence that we did, said or experienced something that would more usefully be forgotten.64 Schacter goes further by claiming that our inability to remember detailed trivial facts may be the key to our ability to generalise and recognise patterns that allow us to organise our view of the world.65

We cannot be sure that the concerns raised in this chapter are justified. Despite our long history of externalising memory, changes to our related practices have always been contentious. The advent of writing, argued Plato's character Socrates in the Phaedrus (274-7), weakened the mind by leading people to rely on external artefacts rather than maintaining internal thought.66 Similarly, the printing press, according to scientist Conrad Gessner, heralded ‘an unmanageable flood of

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information’.67 While these technologies did radically change our memory practices, it would be difficult to argue that they decreased our quality of life. The same may be true of our increasingly digitised blended memories. Distributing aspects of our cognition to external artefacts frees up some of our working memory and allows us to engage in abstract thinking that would otherwise be impossible.68 It also allows us access to a rapidly expanding collective memory that has the potential to be an immensely valuable, if controversial, resource. Perhaps, rather than degrading biological encoding and recall, increasing the amount of our personal history that is stored in external devices will enhance the cueing and reinforcement of our memories through access to extensive digital evidence. Most likely, this will differ for each person, depending on individual traits and exposure to media.

One area in which digital technology has the potential to be particularly beneficial is in cases of severe memory impairment, such as in Alzheimer's Disease, Autism or Schizophrenia. Reviewing digital photos have been found to help reinforcement in general,69 and innovative recording technologies such as Sensecam (a wearable camera that automatically photographs daily movements) have been shown to help people with memory impairment.70 Lee and Dey add a note of caution, however, that people with episodic memory impairment are limited in the number of cues they can use,71 again highlighting the importance of selectivity. Further, as beneficial as digital memory aids would appear to be, particularly for those with memory impairment, there is very limited research into the types of memory these innovations are supporting. There is a risk that what we are really doing when we provide an abundance of memory cues is reinforcing semantic memory but not episodic memory. For example, Pauly-Takacs et al. claim that using a Sensecam helped a 13-year-old boy with profound memory impairment to support the formation of personal semantic memory but failed to support episodic memory.72

A. Engaging blended memory: selectivity, effort and reflectionThe potential biases described in this chapter may, at least to some extent, be

mitigated through authentic cognitive engagement with our memories and their related artefacts. Such engagement is likely to require selectivity, effort and reflection.

Without being selective about what we capture, store, review and share, we risk becoming overwhelmed by our collections of memory artefacts. In recent times, the effort people have spent on arranging printed photos into physical albums, sitting in social spaces and comparing their related memory narratives has been an important part of the consolidation of personalised memory.73 Being selective increases our freedom to engage more fully with fewer artefacts, organising them, reflecting on their meaning and constructing narratives around them with friends and family.

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The reduction of selectivity described in this chapter is, at least in part, a result of some inherent affordances of our digital toolset. An emphasis on increasing the amount of data that can be captured and stored has reduced our incentive to think about the types of information that would most usefully be captured and stored for our individual purposes.74 Practically limitless space allows us to avoid making difficult decisions about what we should or should not keep or, indeed, record in the first place. The price of this freedom may be a loss of criticality about the importance of our memory artefacts. We no longer need to consider what is important to us or why we seek to capture a particular detail. Instead, we tend to take the behaviour of others as justification for our own. We see friends uploading holiday snaps to Facebook and feel obliged to do the same. We see others photographing a tourist landmark and hasten to take out our own camera. What we may not do is question whether these practices suit us as individuals.

Despite our best intentions of sorting through our photos and reflecting on our experiences, it seems many of us simply leave piles of photos in ‘mass-grave’ folders on our computers and hard-drives. Often, we do not annotate them, save for the machine-generated metadata created by our devices.75 This metadata is technology-centric, containing the information that is most easily captured rather than that which is most important to us. In a way, this is an opportunity for us to enter the subjective, personalised information ourselves, and it is only right that we should do so. Such engagement, however, is expensive in terms of time and effort. If the number of our artefacts is too great and the required time and effort exceeds our capacity, we may become overwhelmed and give up.

In his book Things That Make Us Smart, Norman proposed that when we operate in the world, we do so in one of two modes: experiential or reflective.76 The experiential mode allows us to act efficiently and effortlessly and is similar to automatic processing, while the reflective mode involves deeper thinking, comparing and contrasting ideas, and decision making. When we review our photos in experiential mode, skimming through without learning from them, reprocessing our experiences and creating new connections, we are experiencing them more as entertainment than as part of a developmental process. This is a perfectly healthy activity as long as a balance is maintained between such experiential engagement, which helps to maintain interest, and reflective engagement, which helps to forge new connections between ideas.77

Talking about photographs with friends and family is a good way of encouraging reflection since it often provides new perspectives and associations. Although technologies are facilitating new practices of sharing, many of these involve short textual responses rather than the recounting of lengthier narratives. Yet rich narratives are important for the forging of subjective associations. Reminiscence is more effective, too, when conducted in varying contexts and environments. The presence of an unexpected stimulus, being in a different environment, or conversing with someone you haven’t spoken to for a while, often

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promotes the rediscovery of long-forgotten memories. We should attempt to engage not just in remote memory sharing but also co-located sharing, such as that enabled by mobile digital devices or old-fashioned, printed photographs.78 Fortunately, printing and displaying photos in creative ways is becoming easier, with quick and affordable online services providing easy platforms for creating elegant photo books, digital canvas prints, customised greeting cards, and more. Practices such as this aid reflection and help us to be selective since it is not practical to include hundreds of photos in these creations.

While co-located sharing and the creation of printed displays are to be encouraged, reflection need not be restricted to old-fashioned practices. Indeed, new forms of reflection are made possible by digitisation. For example, wearing a Sensecam for a week gave participants of one study an insight into how much time they spent doing particular activities (e.g. driving, eating, playing with their children).79 Another type of memory analysis can be seen through Deb Roy’s HouseFly technology which creates rich data visualisations of activities within a home, allowing various perspectives on family behavioural patterns over time.80 Among other things, this technology allowed him to observe the locations within his home where his son learned to say the word ‘water’.81

Unfortunately, many of our tools currently encourage experiential engagement at the expense of reflection. The sort of reviewing and sharing that occurs across Facebook or Flickr, for example, is often disjointed because we allow the software to make explicit, data-driven links for us, based on date, location, tagging or search algorithms. These tools focus on making it easy to store, review and share photos but this ease, unsurprisingly, comes at the expense of effort. We are able to remain in experiential mode, passively allowing our photographs to wash over us without critical thought. This is not to say that we no longer engage reflectively with these photos, but that our tools do not encourage it.

Although it happens all too rarely, technology can be designed to help us think. For example, posing familiar cues in unusual ways can lead us to reconfigure our thinking about our experiences and form new connections with them. Karen Frostig’s chapter on The Vienna Project shows how a new, digital medium can breathe new life into an old practice to create emotional reactions and critical and abstract reflection.

Creative forms of memory analysis such as those described above have the power to reshape our personal or collective memory. The truth is that we are always reshaping our memory, both personally and culturally. If we accept that remembering involves reconstruction, it is possible to view all memory (and history) as ‘false’ because, rather than retrieving complete records of our past, we are using our imagination to construct a scene around a reduced set of information that we have filtered through our current world view.82 The accuracy of our memories may depend on the qualities and number of this set of informational anchor points, as well as on the difference between our present view and the view

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from which we experienced the original event. Perhaps, though, we should not be overly preoccupied with the accuracy of memory. While it is important that our goals, decision-making and identities are generally aligned with reality, some flexibility may be in our interests. It may, for example, be healthy for us to remember our childhood as happier than it was, or for us to have forgotten some of the more embarrassing or hurtful incidents of our past.

5. ConclusionTechnology should be designed and used in a considered way that increases the

value of our interaction with it, not just the quantity of its output. Digital memory stores, although bringing many significant advantages, demand effort, selectivity and engagement with their contents if they are to support strong connections to our sense of personal experience and identity. This is true for all stages of our blended memory process, including capture, storage, review and sharing. It is important that we explore the ways in which we can use digital artefacts to connect us more meaningfully to our episodic memory as well as to the semantic details of our lives. Those practices and technologies that currently remove us from active engagement with our experiences should be adapted to help us to strengthen our connection with ourselves and the world around us.

Notes

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Tim Fawns is e-Learning Coordinator in Clinical Psychology and tutor on the MSc in Digital Education at the University of Edinburgh. Tim's interests include: distributed cognition and memory, educational uses of technology, and online group dynamics.

20

1 Renos K. Papadopoulos, The Handbook of Jungian Psychology: Theory, Practice and Applications (New York: Psychology Press, 2006), 63.2 Nancy Van House, ‘Collocated Photo Sharing, Story-telling, and the Performance of Self’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 67 (12)(2009): 1078.3 Ibid., 1084.4 Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory.’ In Organization of Memory, ed. Endel Tulving and Wayne Donaldson (New York: Academic Press, 1972), 385.5 Martin A. Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, Journal of Memory and Language, 53 (4)(2005), 596.6 Eryn J. Newman and D. Stephen Lindsay, ‘False Memories : What the Hell are They For ?’, Applied Cognitive Psychology, 23 (2009): 1114.7 Demis Hassabis and Eleanor A. Maguire, ‘Deconstructing Episodic Memory with Construction’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11 (7)(2007): 299.8 Daniel L. Schacter, The Seven Sins of Memory: How the Mind Forgets and Remembers (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2001), 12-40.9 Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, 385.10 Endel Tulving and Daniel L. Schacter, ‘Priming and Memory Systems.’ In Neuroscience year: Supplement 2 to the Encyclopedia of Neuroscience, eds. George Adelman and Barry H. Smith (Cambridge, MA: Birkhauser Boston, 1992), 130.11 Endel Tulving, ‘What is Episodic Memory?’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 2 (1993): 67.12 Endel Tulving, ‘Episodic Memory: From Mind to Brain’. Annual Review of Psychology, 53 (2002): 5.13 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 602-603.14 Mark A. Wheeler, Donald T. Stuss and Endel Tulving, ‘Toward a Theory of Episodic Memory’, Psychological Bulletin, 121 (3)(1997): 345.15 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 599.16 Endel Tulving, Elements of Episodic Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 225.17 Wheeler et al., ‘Toward a Theory’, 349.18 Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, 400.19 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 595.20 Newman and Lindsay, ‘False Memories’, 1116.21 Ibid., 346.22 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 599.23 Sophie E. Lind and Dermot M. Bowler, ‘Episodic Memory and Episodic Future Thinking in Adults with Autism’, Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 119 (4)(2010): 896-905.24 Donna R. Addis, et al., ‘Episodic Simulation of Future Events is Impaired in Mild Alzheimer’s Disease’, Neuropsychologia, 47 (12)(2009): 2660-71.25 Tulving, ‘Episodic and Semantic Memory’, 391.26 Hassabis and Maguire, ‘Deconstructing Episodic Memory’, 299-300.27 Daniel L. Schachter, et al., ‘Policy Forum: Studying Eyewitness Investigations in the Field’, Law and Human Behavior, 32 (1)(2008): 3-5.28 Ibid., 3.29 Elizabeth F. Loftus, ‘Make-believe Memories’, The American Psychologist, 58 (11)(2003): 867-868.30 Daniel M. Bernstien and Elizabeth F. Loftus, ‘How to Tell if a Particular Memory is True or False’, Perspectives on Psychological Science, 4 (4)(2009): 373.31 Ibid., 372.32 Loftus, ‘Make-believe Memories’, 870.33 Bernstien and Loftus, ‘How to Tell’, 373.34 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 595.35 Marshall McLuhan and Quentin Fiore, The Medium is the Massage: An Inventory of Effects (New York: Bantam, 1967), 31-40.36 Andy Clark, Natural-Born Cyborgs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 5.37 Donald A. Norman, Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley Publishing, 1993), 43-75.38 Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 10-15.39 Ibid.40 Emma Berry, et al., ‘The Use of a Wearable Camera, Sensecam, as a Pictorial Diary to Improve Autobiographical Memory in a Patient with Limbic Encephalitis: A Preliminary Report’, Neuropsychological Rehabilitation, 17 (4-5)(2007): 583.41 Asher Koriat, Morris Goldsmith and Ainat Pansky, ‘Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy’, Annual Review of Psychology, 51 (2000), 488.42 Barthes, Camera Lucida, 80.43 Steve Whittaker, Ofer Bergman and Paul Clough, ‘Easy on that Trigger Dad: a Study of Long Term Family Photo Retrieval’, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 14 (1)(2010): 31.

44 Abigail Durrant, et al., ‘Home Curation versus Teenage Photography: Photo Displays in the Family Home’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 67 (12)(2009): 1006.45 Michael Nunes, Saul Greenberg and Carman Neustaedter, ‘Sharing Digital Photographs in the Home Through Physical Mementos, Souvenirs, and Keepsakes.’ In Proceedings of the 7th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive System, (New York: ACM, February 2008), 253, Viewed 2 August 2010, <http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.481>46 Ibid., 252.47 Durrant, et al., ‘Home Curation’, 1014-1017.48 Nunes, Greenberg and Neustaedter, ‘Sharing Digital Photographs’, 254.49 Whittaker, Bergman and Clough, ‘Easy on that Trigger’, 32.50 Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009), 68.51 Ibid, 33.52 Van House, ‘Collocated Photo Sharing’, 1073.53 Schacter, Seven Sins of Memory, 93.54 Stefan Carmien and Gerhard Fischer, ‘Tools for Living and Tools for Learning.’ In Proceedings of the HCI International Conference (HCII), (Las Vegas: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, July 2005), Viewed 13 January 2011, <http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.126.2071>.55 Elizabeth F. Loftus and William H. Calvin, ‘Memory's Future’, Psychology Today, 34 (2)(2001), Viewed 25 March 2008, <http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200103/memorys-future>.56 Van House, ‘Collocated Photo Sharing’, 1082.57 Nunes, Greenberg and Neustaedter, ‘Sharing Digital Photographs’, 254.58 Nancy Van House, ‘Flickr and Public Image-Sharing : Distant Closeness and Photo Exhibition.’ In Proceedings of CHI’07: Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, (San Jose: ACM, 2007), 2720. 59 Dawoud Bey, Class Pictures: Photographs by Dawoud Bey, (New York: Aperture, 2007) cited in Jennie Yabroff, ‘Here's Looking At You, Kids’, Newsweek, 15 March 2008, Viewed 22 March 2008, <http://www.newsweek.com/id/123484>.60 Koriat, Goldsmith and Pansky, ‘Toward a Psychology of Memory Accuracy’, 488.61 Daniel L. Schacter and Donna R. Addis, ‘The Cognitive Neuroscience of Constructive Memory: Remembering the Past and Imagining the Future’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, Series B, Biological Sciences, 362 (1481)(2007): 774.62 Conway, ‘Memory and the Self’, 595.63 Schacter, Seven Sins of Memory, 194.64 Mayer-Schönberger, Delete, 12.65 Schacter, Seven Sins of Memory, 193.66 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Routledge, 1982), 78.67 ‘Don't Touch That Dial! A History of Media Technology Scares, from the Printing Press to Facebook’, Vaughan Bell, Slate, Viewed 2 February 2011, <http://www.slate.com/id/2244198/>.68 Norman, Things That Make Us Smart, 43.69 David West, Aaron Quigley and Judy Kay, ‘MEMENTO: A Digital-physical Scrapbook for Memory Sharing’, Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 11 (4)(2006): 324.70 Berry, et al., ‘Use of a Wearable Camera’, 582-601.71 Matthew L. Lee and Anind K. Dey, ‘Providing Good Memory Cues for People with Episodic Memory Impairment.’ In Proceedings of the 9th international ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Assets, (Tempe, Arizona: ACM, October 2007), 136, Viewed 22 September 2011,<http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=1296843.1296867>.72 Katalin Pauly-Takacs, Chris J. Moulin and Edward J. Estlin, 'SenseCam as a Rehabilitation Tool in a Child with Anterograde Amnesia ', Memory, 19 (7)(2011): 710, Viewed 5 August 2011, <http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09658211.2010.494046>.73 Robyn Fivush and Katherine Nelson, ‘Culture and Language in the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory’, Psychological Science: a Journal of the American Psychological Society / APS, 15 (9)(2004): 576-577.74 Mayer-Schonberger, Delete, 68-70.75 Van House, ‘Collocated Photo Sharing’, 1078.76 Norman, Things That Make Us Smart, 15-17.77 Ibid., 16-17.78 Van House, ‘Collocated Photo Sharing’, 1082-1084.79 Siân E. Lindley, et al., ‘Reflecting on Oneself and on Others : Multiple Perspectives via SenseCam’, CHI 2009 Workshop on Designing for Reflection on Experience, (Boston: ACM, April 2009), 3, Viewed 10 January 2011,<http://research.microsoft.com/apps/pubs/default.aspx?id=102058>.80 Philip DeCamp, et al., ‘An Immersive System for Browsing and Visualizing Surveillance Video.’ In Proceedings of the International Conference on Multimedia, (Florence: ACM, 2010), 371-380, Viewed October 3 2011, <http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1874002>

81‘Deb Roy: The Birth of a Word’, TED, Viewed June 1, 2011, <http://www.ted.com/talks/deb_roy_the_birth_of_a_word.html>.82 Bernstien and Loftus, ‘How to Tell’, 373.