This post is your memory
“Hold each item in your hands, as close to your heart as possible. And then, pay close attention to how your body responds. When something sparks joy, you should feel a little thrill running through your body, as if your body is somehow slowly rising up to meet the item, embracing it even.”
— Marie Kondo
If an object does not ‘spark joy’, then professional declutterer Marie Kondo believes we should throw it out. It’s a thought-provoking idea. Objects embody emotion. Or they don’t.
A picture of the cat you had when you were a child, a love letter from an old flame, a ratty old t-shirt you wore in college; these all trigger an unfurling of emotion and memory.
But it’s easy to make a category error here: this effect shouldn’t be conceptualised as a sort of one-off, unexpected emotional response. Instead, it should be seen as something much more significant: objects as memories.
More than just objects triggering the emotional residue of past lives, we deeply interweave with objects through a process of offloading, of expressing and enacting our thoughts, memories, and skills. It’s even the case that we sometimes don’t — or can’t — recall a particular memory until we encounter an object associated with it .
There’s many names for this process. Cognitive offloading, external cognition, the extended mind thesis, enactivism and so on. They each vary in how they describe how we ‘think’ with the world. Suffice to say, this process isn’t a particularly ‘out there’ thought (so to speak…). Our mind extends into the world in complicated and dynamic ways. For the purposes of this article, I’m focussing on what might be called external cognition, or cognitive offloading, that is, using the environment as patchworks of memories.
It’s intuitively obvious that we do this.
Do you remember peoples’ phone numbers?
Of course not — why expend energy on something that we ‘remember’ in our technological environment? Our phones remember phone numbers so we don’t have to.
We adapt to our environment to help us. We implicitly understand that phone numbers serve no purpose in and of themselves, so if we can avoid the need to remember them while still having the same capacities (i.e. calling people we know), we will.
This is phenomenon of life itself. Humans — all life — adapt to their environment in both longer times scales (e.g. through us evolving to adapt to our environment) and shorter time scales (e.g., through using objects to help us remember).
Now, I’ve written about how our environment ‘becomes’ us through the phenomena of us ‘coping’ with the affordances in the world. Put simply, we adapt to our world, and in adapting to our environment, our environment reaches into us. Our environment shapes who we are.
But through the sort of cognitive extension described above, we can see how this process isn’t unilateral; we extend into the environment just as our environment extends into us.
How we ‘think’ using our environment (I’m not going to use quotes anymore for this term — this is an important conceptual step!) creates a multiplicity of purpose, which destabilises and challenges our conception on what particular objects do in the world.
As an example, consider making a list of groceries. It’s a method of remembering through representation. A list of groceries would represent the groceries you want to remember. In its material essence, the list would have nothing to do with the desired groceries themselves.
But consider another example: your clothes. Why do you browse through them in your wardrobe?
A wardrobe is not just a storage receptacle for your clothes. Browsing your wardrobe is also a cognitive action, to remind yourself of the clothes you do have (these actions are known as epistemic actions). You needn’t remember all the clothes you have, you simply don’t have to, because they are there to act as reminders of themselves.
If the only way you could access your clothes was to remember them without prompts (say, you had a locked box that required you to type the article of clothing you wanted, unprompted), you would put much more conscious (and indeed unconscious) cognitive effort into remembering each article of your clothing. Because you don’t, because they are always there to remind you that they are there, you cognitively adapt and do not put very much effort into remembering them. But you do need to engage with them — i.e. browse them — to remind you of the clothes and outfits you have, and might wear.
Sidenote: This is part of the false alarmism that suggests computers are making our memories worse. Studies have shown that we remember particular data less when we know have access to that a data on an accessible computer. But of course we would! This is human adaptation and habituation.Browsing your wardrobe is a bit different from say, you writing down a list down of your clothes, or drawing pictures of them. These would be a representation or a signifier of your clothes, but obviously, not the clothes themselves.
So your clothes, stored in your wardrobe, are both the instrumental object you will use, and a reminder of themselves as your browse them. They are both the thing itself and a representation of itself .
Digital technologies that we have active engagement with have these ‘thing itself’ and ‘reminder’ qualities as well. Tabs, windows, and bookmarks are all examples. They not only act as the interactive component for the user, they also act as a signifier of their presence; that is, they remind you that they are there and that you have engaged with them, for whatever reason.
When we do something with digital technology it becomes alive with meaning.
A tab of a search you conducted about wolves would both be how you engage in your interest in the difference between dogs and wolves and a reminder of your particular curiosity in the subject. A Spotify window of a playlist might represent and remind you of your sudden interest in chamber psych. This playlist would be both a representation of your interest in it and how you actually engage with that interest.
But wait — much like Marie Kondo’s emotional objects, these can have emotional and episodic elicitations as well. Your web search about dogs and wolves reminds you of the little girl who cried “wolf” and hid behind her mum when she saw your dog (who is a husky….). Your ‘chamber psych’ playlist reminds you of your anxiety that web platforms seem to be creating typologies of meaning; chamber psych was not a genre that existed until Spotify decided it was.
In this way digital artifacts have an enormously complicated cognitive interweaving with us. When we engage with them, we are faced with:
- An interface of a particular digital artifact
- A reminder that we were engaging with a particular digital artifact
- A signifier of a particular personal episode that necessitated engaging with that digital artifact
Another sidenote: If you're familiar with semiotics - especially Peircean - this may be ringing bells but I'm not going to get into them in this post!Given step 2 and 3, it’s not a stretch to claim the following: the design of these digital objects is designing the strata of our thought. That is, their structure and affordances shape how and what we remember.
For instance, Photoshop offers a history panel, detailing each step you take, for example changing contrast or adding an image. These don’t just allow you to access the history but also remind you what you’ve done.
This is a very explicit form of offloading.
But such forms of cognitive interweaving with digital technologies occur in much more idiosyncratic ways as well, in ways that designers never intended or even predicted.
For example, I’ve spoken to people who were afraid of closing tabs because they were afraid of ‘forgetting’ interesting things. They forget their personal episodes (3, above) that necessitated them looking this up. Yet keeping all the tabs open creates ‘tab overload’ — a cognitive burden — due to the digital and signifying affordances being poor in terms of providing us with the manipulability for personal meaning-making.
Another example is email inboxes, which are used by many people as ad hoc task lists. The ‘mark as unread’ feature came about for this reason: by clicking on an ‘unread’ email in your inbox you are telling the interface and therefore yourself, “I have dealt with this”. Of course, sometimes you haven’t. Sometimes you read emails and still need to deal with them (step 2, above)— by replying or performing another action. Yet you wouldn’t remember to read it unless you could somehow make it unread — a paradoxical feature, you can’t ‘unread’ anything, but one that proved necessary because of how we came to use email.
These are very mild examples of how we offload our thoughts onto technologies. Designing for externalising thought is hugely exciting, yet frighteningly underdeveloped.
This is because, as previously noted, designers design for action (not for legibility of the socio-technical systems). Designers certainly do not design for building our external cognitive apparatus. The nonsensical ‘mark as unread’ feature only came about retrospectively, because designers were unable to imagine how people cognitively interweave with technology.
Of the 3 steps above, designers really only understand the first. This is not entirely their fault, but they are also not entirely faultless.
‘Web 2.0’ has focussed on the social, on deepening our engagement with content. Notifications, feeds, connectivity and higher internet speeds engender an endless treadmill of content. We’re afforded multitudes of ways to be served content yet afforded very little to cognitively manage and make sense of this content.
The incessant need for sensory feedback that stimulates the engine of capitalism means that empowering users through stable, transparent, and accessible cognitive interweaving is of lesser importance than simply feeding the user more stuff.
Our main portal into the internet is a testament to this approach. Web browsers represent an utter dearth of ingenuity in how we might better cognitively interweave with the web. Bookmarks have barely changed in a quarter of a century. This is what bookmarks looked like 25 years ago:
This is what they look like now:
Do I need to show you how much websites themselves have changed?
This focus on feeding rather than managing means that any type of cognitive interweaving is privatised as a ‘personal organisational’ issue rather than the complex, dynamic interweaving of cognition with our digital material environment. We see this in productivity apps and techniques that do little in terms of original cognitive offloading; they often only add layers of complexity on top of already ineffectual systems.
The anaemic understanding of how we interweave cognitively with the environment does not need to exist. Academics have been studying this for years. In his well-read (but not in the digital industry, obviously) article, David Kirsch discusses many distinct benefits of being able to effectively externalise thoughts, including new capacities for explicitness, memory, annotation, re-arrangement, and re-representation.
I’m ambivalent about Ms. Kondo’s advice. On the one hand, she’s absolutely right that objects hold enormous emotional and episodic power. On the other, we don’t know what memories a seemingly innocuous object may hold in our future. We often don’t consciously offload. If we adapt well to an environment, the offloading is largely unconscious. Being merciless in throwing out objects implies a sort of callousness towards one’s future memory.
And with digital objects, the cost of keeping them is low. They take up so little meaningful space — although we still feel cluttered. But this is simply because we aren’t empowered to manage digital objects, manage our cognition. To help solve this, saying “yep, my web browser is my memory” is the first step. It’s only a conceptual one, but ideas must change before the material world can.
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Wardrobe image taken by CC license from here.
