How Memory Shapes Us in a Digital World
Each of us is undeniably individual, yet we all long for connection. We celebrate our free will and unique personalities, yet still find ourselves shaped by family, by culture, by inherited ways of seeing. We are autonomous, yes, but we are also made of memories, some of which aren’t even ours.
Not just the things we recall, but how we carry them. The form they take. The way they move through us. Memory is both lineage and longing. It is the trace of a place we have never seen, the story passed down through generations, the feeling we cannot explain but recognise when a phrase is spoken, or a rhythm is heard.
Yet in today’s world, saturated with screens, systems, and incessant signalling, memory is changing. It is being measured, coded, tracked, predicted. It has become a resource to be mined, a dataset to be sold, and, with the rise of AI, a potential weapon pointed back at us. We are led to believe that storage equals safety. That forgetting is deletion. Personal digital photo albums now stretch into the tens of thousands. Social media trails extend across decades. An ever-expanding record of the self.
But perhaps the opposite is true. Perhaps forgetting, like shadows shifting, is part of perception. Perhaps not everything was meant to be preserved. Maybe memory, like identity, needs to breathe.
This series, We Carry What We Choose, is a sincere and mindful inquiry into memory in our age of mediation. Not a manifesto or a treatise. It is a set of essays written in the spirit of investigation, not expertise or journalism. A way of asking, with intention and curiosity, what it means to remember ethically when so much of what we are is being mirrored back to us by machines.
Each essay explores a different facet of memory’s entanglement with power, technology, and identity:
- The illusion of perfect digital recall, and the quiet freedom of forgetting.
- The tactile dignity of analogue memory: magnetic tape, handwriting, slowness.
- The complicated politics of cultural heritage, ancestry, and nationalist nostalgia.
All of these essays are grounded in a single belief: memory is not neutral. It never was. It is shaped by language, by story, by systems of power. And now, increasingly, by technologies not necessarily designed with care in mind.
This is an exercise in holding space for better questions. Questions about autonomy. About belonging. About how to remember without reproducing trauma. About how to forget in ways that heal. Ways that grow and maintain.
I’ve come to these questions through my personal lens, one that is imbued through music and inquiry. Through rhythm and curiosity. Through listening and reflection. Through wondering why some memories endure while others vanish. Through the sense that something essential is at risk in the world, and in ourselves.
And perhaps also through silence. Many of us grow up within cultures that are felt more than explained, held in gestures, recipes, routines, or stories and songs. The language is spoken, the traditions followed, the rhythms familiar. Yet the deeper stories are often left untouched. The culture is present, but unexamined. It lives in the rituals, but not always in the conversations. That quiet paradox—the presence of memory without context—can leave a mark that only becomes visible much later.
This is not from a top-down perspective, but from alongside. As someone still learning. Still gathering fragments. Still shaped by migration, by absences, by stories half-told. And maybe that is the point. Memory is not something we study from a distance. It is something we live inside of. We all carry echoes: family histories, childhood traumas, cultural gestures, half-forgotten songs. What we do with them matters.
These are a kind of map: of tensions and intentions. A map made of questions about what we choose to carry forward, and what we are willing, perhaps even needful, to let go. A map for artists, technologists, thinkers, and wanderers who suspect that the way we remember has everything to do with the kind of world we are building.
Because the truth is, we are all creators of memory. Each of us, increasingly empowered by the tools to document and preserve our stories, shaping the record that will one day shape others. And whether we realise it or not, the echoes we leave behind will shape the future that remembers us.
