Vertigo

W G Sebald

It was a severe disappointment, Beyle writes, when some years ago, looking through old papers, he came across an engraving entitled Prospetto d'Ivrea and was obliged to concede that his recollected picture of the town in the evening sun was nothing but a copy of that very engraving. This being so, Beyle's advice is not to purchase engravings of fine views and prospects seen on one's travels, since before very long they will displace our memories completely, indeed one might say they destroy them. For instance, he could no longer recall the wonderful Sistine Madonna he had seen in Dresden, try as he might, because Muller's engraving after it had become superimposed in his mind; the wretched pastels by Mengs in the same gallery, on the other hand, of which he had never set eyes on a copy, remained before him as clear as when he first saw them. 

Sebald's consciousness of image and memory, as demonstrated in the quote above, is worth keeping in mind in this age of remade memory, as sponsored by Facebook and the general digital record of life. That a picture can replace our memory is something we were already getting used to--you have known that some of your earliest childhood memories are actually memories influenced by pictures of that era, or even worse, the memories of pictures themselves. But now, as pictures become the purpose rather than the record, as people do things in order to take a picture, we have to worry, what will our memory be like fifty years from now?

Although such online functions as Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, and YouTube have become known as Social Networking, what they truly are is Social Remembering. Social networking is a tool for the public editing of individual memories. We have always edited our memories in a public realm; the familial or friendly act of remembering, telling over the experiences everyone already knows, recreating the feelings of the time of memory, storytelling, have always been our most conscious means of making changes to our memory. Though memories can be changed on our own, though we can find our memories of past events changed by the feelings and acts of life as they weigh down on our memories, the method of changing memory over which we have the most control is by exposing our memories socially, curing them like wet paint in the open air. Through the gift of belief, society can give us a power over our memories that we could never escape with in the solitude of our lonesomeness. As with so many things, there is safety in numbers when it comes to remembering.


Memory has always been somewhat social in its function: the most conscious means by which we edit our memories is the telling of them as stories to others. The elements of the social environment became the components with  which our stories reacted. Relating a memory to a certain group of people, we are mindful of what we think the group wants to hear and using that information to produce effects. But as we export our memories to a Facebook existence, we are relinquishing much of this little control we once had over the structure of our own stories. Social networking websites exert a much stronger influence on the memories we hand over to them.  Like a person writing a journal for a specific audience--a persuasive journal--these are false records or the reality of our past. More false even than our own memories. And, dangerously, they are more powerful than our own memories.

All these pompous words are to say to my generation: when you are sixty, you won't have memories, you'll have Facebook albums, profiles, MySpace pages, and YouTube channels and these will be your memories.