Remember Vine? That video app that let you record six second videos and would loop them? Twitter owned it, and in 2017 they announced that the app would disabled and all videos would disappear. A promised archive of the videos never came to fruition. I joined in 2012 when it started and created hundreds of videos documenting life with my son who was born that same year. The videos were six second snapshots of his growth; they captured the mundane and momentous events of babyhood and toddlerhood. When the app disappeared along with two year’s of footage I began printing photo albums.
A few years earlier, in 2011, my laptop was stolen when our house was broken into. Five years of carefully downloaded music, digital photos, papers, and projects were suddenly gone. Most of the photos were backed up on discs but the library of music and much of my academic work was gone. This was before the days of the cloud, that nebulous invention where our entire digital library lives. These experiences, and my failure to back up files up on a hard drive, make me skeptical of digital memory preservation.

Recently, my dad gave me a stack of typed poems my grandfather wrote. He never published any of them; they are a tangible trace of his life and imagination left after his death. In addition to the poems, I have a few letters he wrote to me during my teen years. I keep these in a drawer with other meaningful letters from friends and family. An entire wall of framed photos greeted me every time I entered my grandparent’s house; I lingered to look every visit even though nothing changed over the twenty-five years I came and went. The archive of their life was on display; a remnant of it sits in a folder near my desk.
In I’m Still Here, the 2024 Oscar nominated international feature from Brazil, Eunice Pavia keeps a box full of photos and film reels as well as a binder of every paper related to the disappearance of her husband. In one scene she opens the box, sets up the projector and watches movies of their family before he was taken by military police. Earlier in the movie we witness a letter and roll of film arrive from her daughter who’s living in England; she reads the letter as the video footage plays, the younger siblings listen and watch in rapt attention. As soon as it finishes, they ask to hear and see it again.
I’m inclined to be nostalgic. I also struggle to wrap my arms around the sheer volume of photos on my phone(s), the continuously ballooning inbox, and the endlessly accumulating docs and files on google drive. How will I ever sift through the archive of my life? How will my kids and grandkids access all the memories I so carefully preserved on hard drives and in the cloud? Has the ability to produce so much content diminished the preciousness of the record of our existence? Will future generations take one look at the thousands of photos and shrug, because who has the time to sort through it all? I certainly don’t, and I’m the one who took them! Will there be evidence of my deep friendships from the millions of text messages? Where will they discover the relational connections, the web of personal networks once saved through letters?
Perhaps the desire to be remembered is vain, narcissistic. I hope future generations seek out their ancestors. Material objects are subject to rot and decay as much as digital storage is subject to loss and disappearance into the ethereal cloud. I’m pretty sure there’s a parable about not storing up treasures of earth but something about the array of tangible books, papers, photos, actual film(!) throughout so many scenes in I’m Still Here provoked pangs of sadness. Will a footprint of our lives exist or will all our feeble attempts to capture the moment disappear with us? And while we were recording those concerts and photographing those scenes, we were missing the main event all along.
Another great read April, Thank you. So true and so poignant.