Suse Cairns, writing about how carrying her iPhone around with her as a (then) later adopter PhD student changed her way of seeing (and experiencing) the world,
I now see socially. I listen, not just for myself, but for what I can translate and share to my networks. I pay attention to the ideas that you, my network, is interested in, and in so doing, I encounter the world through that lens. The things I notice are not of interest to me alone. I notice those things that I think you would be interested in too, and I think of you when I am noticing them.
This is probably a familiar experience for many of you.
But I also think it is one that passes – over time – and in my case has been replaced by a sense of ‘constant short term nostalgia’.
Timehop is a good example of a service that feeds this desire. It works by reminding you everyday of what you did exactly one year, two years, three years and more, ago to the day on the various social services that you’ve given it access to – your tweets, your photos, your location checkins.
There is no forward or back in the interface. Just the past, exactly to the day. It is a constraint that greatly enhances its appeal/addiction.
Much like my children who won’t, until the Great Power Outage comes, be able to forget the overly-detailed photographic renderings of their childhoods, Timehop (and the more diary-like Momento) is a constant reminder of what you were saying that you were doing, what you thought was interesting enough to photograph, and where you were.
I’m not as concerned as, say Simon Reynolds, about this, but it is uncharted territory. This is related to, but qualitatively different from, the constant warnings to young people about the ‘permanency’ of unfortunate public overshares.
Just as there is value in being able to forget, there may also be value in not ‘seeing socially’ (Goffman, anyone?) – or at least, being able to un-see.