How i remember it

There’s an app coming soon that allows you to remove things from your photographs. Irritating things like passers-by or cars that obscure you - or even the background you were hoping for. Fittingly it’s called Remove and it works quite simply by taking a few pictures whenever you think you are taking one and then identifies the bits that moved (and can therefore be removed).



Now that sounds simple enough, and quite a promising service – even one that phone and camera manufacturers might include as standard once we get over storage issues and the like. But it got me thinking about memories. I’m lucky enough to be old enough that my entire life hasn’t been captured on camera and a good proportion of what has, hasn’t yet made it on to the web (yet). I don’t really remember much before being about 7, but most of what I do remember of that, and probably the next 5 years, is largely connected to or based on photos and/or stories recounted to me.

What does this mean for those younger than me, both now and in the future? At first glance they’re in a better position, with a greater degree of certainty. The building blocks of our memories are now stored for us on the web; on Flickr, Instagram, YouTube and the like. However, as Jonah recounted in Wired last year, memories are reconsolidated - they aren’t static but are recreated at the point of recall.

We all know what Photoshop does for supermodels, and in film I’ve seen what can be done working with a great company that does product placement. They digitally embed brands into pre-recorded film and TV content. They can (and do) switch the model and brand of TV or PC in your favourite soap, or insert a can of a certain brand of cola in front of the presenter throughout that talent show you watch but shouldn’t. Now they can’t do this real-time yet but it is coming soon enough. It’s also not hard to imagine how one could use technology a bit like Photosynth to adapt photographs in a similar way, using location to find other photos and matching up the content to reshape, replace and remove items in the shot either dynamically or in batches.

As brands seek to build deeper and more meaningful relationships with consumers, and are willing to pay the premium for doing so, it’s not hard to see where these trends and technologies could take us. As someone like Facebook can just buy the rights to my photos on Instagram, how long before they are adapted and reshuffled to reconsolidate my memory or other’s perceptions of me, my taste and preferences? How different is this really to a sophisticated superstitial, or to Project Glass and augmented reality?

Perhaps, as the guy in Eternal sunshine says, these adaptations will be “on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss”, and probably we’ll be willing to suffer the intrusion if the benefit is significant enough. But I think I prefer Huxley’s notion – “that every man's memory is his private literature”.