How do we use the internet to collect and remember? Especially in times of COVID when there is so much loss. Does the internet allow us to remember? Or is it dooming us into forgetting more? If so, is there anything a digital collection allows us to do instead? And what does this look like?
These are the questions I will be exploring in this blog post. I have been fascinated by both memory and the act of collecting–central topics to my most recent course, “Creating Digital Collections”–for a long time, and I have recently spent a lot of time reflecting on them (such as in my previous informal blog post). Not just because of my course, but also because these are the times of COVID-19, where I spent a lot of the past year surrounded by all the possessions I’ve kept since childhood, and with plenty of time to think. Despite now living in a new apartment, constantly busy with my studies, I (or anyone else) cannot go a day without the effects of COVID showing up in every aspect of daily life. There is a new lockdown, a first-time curfew, and our class will be creating our own “COVID Collection” in the continuation of this course next term. On a more somber note, though I have so far personally not lost anyone due to COVID, the number of deaths continues to climb every day and–as with any statistic–becomes harder to fathom the larger it grows.
One person who is trying to fight this is Alex Goldstein, the man that started the Twitter page @FacesOfCOVID. Set out to put faces to that ever-growing number, he started a digital collection of tweets that each memorialize an American that has died of COVID. With over 4000 tweets and counting, his page continues to bring the stories of loss to a larger public, allowing people to empathize in a way that simply isn’t possible with the ever-growing statistics. Just a day before his inauguration, during a broadcasted memorial service for the victims of COVID, even President Biden expressed the importance of remembering:
This collection was on my mind when I read Ekaterina Haskins’ paper about physical and digital memorials, and I will use this blog post and the case of “Faces of COVID” (FoC) to critically reflect on some of her arguments. Haskins (2007) has two main claims that stood out to me: First, that “digital memory” (such as online collections, memorials, archives, etc.) collapses the distinction between “archival memory,” which concerns storing and organizing, and “lived memory,” the traditional ‘being present’ and interacting with others (pp. 401-402). Second, she argues that digital memory practices are leading to collective amnesia (p. 406).
These are both certainly valid arguments and there are examples that support them (that didn’t even exist yet when she wrote the paper): Instagram is a place to share and interact with your own and others’ memories as you create them, but also generates a digital record/collection of your ‘memories’ to overview. And there have been multiple other articles on whether our habit of capturing everything in pictures is actually making us more forgetful (Resnick, 2018).
However, I couldn’t help but also feel some resistance towards her arguments. Does the internet–and our memory practices on them–always collapse the archival and the lived aspects? And does it always prompt us to rely more on technology, thus causing us to forget? Or, perhaps, more importantly, are there practices in digital/new media collections in which remembering is not the most important thing? To answer my questions, I dive deeper into Haskins’ ideas and arguments, before reflecting upon them through a case study of the Faces of COVID collection.
Archival vs. Lived Memory, and the Risk of Amnesia
Collections are, in the broadest sense, a series or class of objects that have a representational value. The more specifically you want to define them, the riskier it gets. In a paper dedicated to exactly this, Susan Pearce (1994) still concludes: “collecting is too complex and too human an activity to be dealt with summarily by way of definitions” (p.159). One key aspect that most agree upon though, is that “a collection is more than the sum of its parts” (p. 159). The introduction of the digital only further complicated our understandings of collections, as it vastly expanded the possibilities. Haskins’ herself recognizes these possibilities:
At least in theory, online memorializing can accommodate an infinite variety of artifacts and performances. Because all new media objects are composed of digital code (Manovich 27), it becomes possible to collect, preserve, sort, and display a vast amount of texts, drawings, photography, video, and audio recordings. In addition to this capacity to ‘‘translate’’ other media into digital code, the function of hyperlinking facilitates inter-connectedness among different sources, producing a cacophonous heteroglossia of public expression (Warnick, Critical Literacy 107) (p. 405).
This makes evident that Haskins doesn’t see the introduction of new media practices as some “big bad” influence, but merely something that warrants critical reflection. Since the time of her writing, the possibilities she mentioned have indeed been utilized and continued to be expanded rapidly. Where she still only spoke of blogging, in the approximately 13 years that followed, a whole world of social media and networking would be born and infiltrate our everyday practices, including those dealing with memory.
Haskins argues “that ‘‘digital memory,’’ more than any other form of mediation, collapses the assumed distinction between modern ‘‘archival’’ memory and traditional ‘‘lived’’ memory by combining the function of storage and ordering on the one hand, and of presence and interactivity on the other” (pp. 401-402). By this, she means that the internet facilitates practices where we both experience our new memories and store and organize them simultaneously. As mentioned earlier, Instagram is the ultimate example of this. Everyone’s Instagram account is essentially their own small digital collection that reflects their life, or if they have an account for specific interests they are curating those (such as my own digital sketchbook page). However, not every social media is like this, and I would argue that not all digital memory practices focus on both the “archival” and the “lived”, or at the very least are not suitable for both.
Unlike Instagram, Twitter is not oriented towards providing an easy access archive. On your profile, there is only a full feed of your own posts and retweets, a feed that also includes your responses to others’ tweets, a feed that shows only tweets you posted that include other forms of media, and a feed of your likes. There is no way to navigate these other than by scrolling, or with an elaborate workaround of the “advanced search” option on Twitter where you can search exclusively your own tweets (by adding “(from:@yourusername)” in the search bar), but this only works for textual content, so it’s very hard to look for specific tweets or browse much older tweets. All this points to the fact that Twitter is not ideal (if not plainly unsuitable) for archival memory practices, and is much more suitable and intended for constantly generating new content and interacting, thus, more lived memory practices. Yet, there are plenty of Twitter accounts that generate tweets as part of a collection. From pages dedicated to sharing art, like @artimitelavie, to Kpop fans dedicating entire accounts to just images and videos of their favorite idols. Twitter is undoubtedly a platform where collections are being created and interacted with.
In addition to her argument on the collapse between archival and lived memory, Haskins’ biggest concern is that digital memory practices will lead to the public forgetting more and more things, explaining: “When technology offers the ability of instant recall, individual impulse to remember withers away” (p. 407). And she’s not the only one, a web article by Brian Resnick (2018) compiles intel from multiple studies that indeed points to the fact that our reliance on digital memory (particularly photography) is causing us to engage our own memory less extensively. Additionally, the presence of smartphones can be a distracting factor in the experience of making memories, thus causing us to miss other things.
Still, diversity of content, collective authorship, and interactivity are all factors of digital memory that Haskins (2007) points to for having the potential to positively stimulate the public in engaging in memory work, but these features function within a medium that harbors both a larger cultural context and specific constraints. (p. 406) As mentioned earlier, Twitter does not allow for easy retrieval of posts because you cannot overview them all at once, only search for textual content. Instagram, on the other hand, is half geared towards an easy (and aesthetic) overview of your collection, but you can only search for things by hashtags, never for just words. In this way, each digital memory platform has features that limit the user’s ability to return to things, being geared instead towards the generating of new content, keeping your collection evergrowing. Haskins adds:
One cannot ignore that today’s memorializing occurs in a climate of rapid obsolescence and … that much of computer-mediated communication serves commercial and entertainment purposes, and that interactivity can nurture narcissistic amnesia no less than communal exchange (p. 406).
And surely, commercial and entertainment purposes underly almost all of social media, but I personally think there are also users finding ways to embrace this departure from needing to not just store but also remember everything. If a collection continues to gain engagement and provoke interactions, are there circumstances where it’s okay if a collection isn’t focused on the ability for its objects to be retrieved? This is where my case study comes into view.
Faces of COVID
Somewhere around November, I came across the Twitter account @FacesOfCOVID and immediately felt obligated to follow it. The name speaks for itself: the Twitter page, created in March of 2020 and run by Alex Goldstein, post multiple tweets every day containing at least the name, face, and a few words of a person that died of COVID. Many tweets also include age, town, date of passing, and a link to any more extensive obituary for the deceased. Goldstein creates all of the tweets himself, either getting the person’s information from different news outlets, or from a google form (linked in the bio of the page, see further below) that people can use to request a post for a loved one that has passed away. About making the tweets, Goldstein (2020) writes: “I make sure to read everything from start to finish, striving for accuracy as I write the corresponding posts, and, most important, I try to bear witness to the loss of this person from the Earth.” This way, Goldstein attempts to give even just a glimpse into the beautiful and varied lives that were lived and cut short due to the virus.
I want to acknowledge that I was worried at first whether it would be controversial to refer to humans and their lives as things that could represent objects in a collection. Our lives are so unique and vast that they could not be reduced into a single countable thing. Therefore, it is important to note that the ‘objects’ of the FoC collection are not the humans and their life’s stories themselves, but the tweets that represent each of these individuals, and that often hyperlink to their more extensive obituaries and other online spaces of remembrance.
Faces of COVID does not exclusively post single tweets without structure all the time. Goldstein has composed special threads (tweets that are listed under each other to form a sort of subset of tweets) for certain special occasions, such as one for the young victims of COVID and one for K-12 teachers & school staff that died. Another special occasion happened just yesterday when, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, Goldstein exclusively posted Holocaust survivors that died of COVID.
On top of its own posts, FoC also retweets many tweets by other users that interact with FoC tweets, often friends or family members that comment on their relationship to the person in the post. These aspects all highlight how the collection stimulates interaction and active forms of remembering, in this case, “memorializing.” Though, as previously explained, Twitter is not the best medium for archival forms of memory, the Faces of COVID collection seems to not be concerned with this as much. Every post/individual gets their own moment, and to the affected families, the tweets will not replace or carry the task of remembering the loved one that has died. Rather, they give a moment of attention to yet another life lost, and in combination with the rest of the posts continue to confront the public with the severity of the pandemic.
As discussed, one of Haskins’ biggest concerns is the increased amnesia through digital remembering: “If archival preservation and retrieval are not balanced by mechanisms that stimulate participatory engagement, electronic memory may lead to self-congratulatory amnesia” (p. 407). However, as was just shown, FoC finds a few different ways to continuously engage the public on the same issue. The fact that it would be hard to find the first few posts of the collection is less important to the mission of the collection than the constant flow of obituaries and interactions with family members.
As becomes clear in the above linked CNBC interview with Goldstein, the purpose of FoC is also not to remember everyone, (their 4000 tweets would only cover about 1% of the current number of deaths in the USA) but rather to give COVID a face. This, to make sure people are able to see themselves, thus seeing the severity and forcing them to recognize their own responsibilities and to make it impossible for the leaders of the country to ignore the severity.
This means that the memorial, the collection of the faces of COVID, serves a purpose other than remembering and preserving the past. A purpose that is geared towards the future and towards creating a collective memory that will inspire action. In his own words, Goldstein (2020) says:
“What do we do with our memories? How do we make sense of our loss? For me, the answer is to work to make America a place where we have a responsibility to care about the neighbors we’ve never met, a place where what matters isn’t who is the last one standing, but whom we stand beside.”
Conclusion
To me, Goldstein’s answer to the questions “What do we do with our memories?” and “How do we make sense of our loss?” also perfectly summarizes the point I’ve been making about the role digital collections can have other than remembering, and how in order to do so they may take unconventional shapes. Haskins’ concerns of a collapse between archival and lived memory, and increased amnesia, were both shown to be valid concerns. Yet, at the same time, I have shown how a digital collection might neglect certain restrictions by focusing on other features more relevant to the purpose of the collection.
The immense power of this collection is perhaps best described by admitting that I–while gathering information–had to pause multiple times, staring at the screen in front of me, blinking away some tears. Despite the fact that I’ve been following this page on my own Twitter for a few months now, being exposed to so many individual stories of loss, and seeing those involved actively interact with the tweet of their loved ones had exactly the effect on me as a user that Alex Goldstein wanted to achieve when he created this account. The pandemic feels real, the threat dangerous, and my role significant.
References
@FacesOfCOVID. (2020, October 14). We know them. They taught us. They looked out for us. They inspired us.Today, we remember a few. Twitter. https://twitter.com/FacesOfCOVID/status/1316406170979106817.
@FacesOfCOVID. (2020, October 29). The relentless misinformation from the Trump Administration that dismisses the severity of COVID & outright lies about who it impacts. Twitter. https://twitter.com/FacesOfCOVID/status/1321808147875536896.
Goldstein, A. (2020, December 25). What I Have Seen Running the FacesOfCOVID Twitter Feed. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/what-i-have-seen-running-faces-covid-twitter-feed/617483/.
Haskins, E. (2007). Between Archive and Participation: Public Memory in a Digital Age, Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 37:4, 401-422.
Pearce, S (1994). The Urge to Collect, Susan Pearce (ed.), Interpreting Objects and Collections, London, pp. 157-9.
Resnick, B. (2018, March 28). What smartphone photography is doing to our memories. Vox. https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/3/28/17054848/smartphones-photos-memory-research-psychology-attention.