Active Recall
May 30, 2025 at 04:30PM“Video makes it easy to be completely honest and selective, all at the same time,” writes Kristin Winet in Panorama: The Journal of Travel, Place, and Nature. Winet’s thoughtful essay, part of Panorama’s issue 14 on survival, explores video as an intimate medium to document family memories; the ephemerality of daily life; and the inevitable process of forgetting.
The loss, I know, sounds devastating. But it is part of what allows us to be human: imagine if you remembered every detail of your life, down to the second, and it all took up precious space in your brain? The people who do claim to remember every single day of their lives—people with hyperthymesia, or the extraordinary ability to recall every day of their lives—also tend to suffer from the weight of what they carry. Imagine never being able to forget a single embarrassing thing you said; imagine never being able to forget the words in a fight you had with an old boyfriend; the weather on May 12, 2011; the homework assignment you did in 1991; the t-shirt your son was wearing when they cut him out of it in the emergency room when he was having his first seizure.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/05/30/memory-video-digital-forgetting/
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