No thank you to ‘fixing’ memories
If you watched the Super Bowl this year, you almost certainly saw the advertisement. It opens with swelling orchestral music. White text unrolls on a black background. “For years,” it reads, “our phones have captured our memories.” Photos of parties and family vacations flip across the screen. “Now, it’s time to fix them.”
The ad was for the new Google Pixel smartphone — specifically, its Magic Eraser tool, which allows you to easily eliminate unwanted people and objects from your photos.
For months, this ad has seemingly populated almost every destination in my online travels. And I find it pretty dystopian.
Why is the corporation that arguably knows more about my inner thoughts, fears and desires than any other company on Earth trying to sell me a product to fix my memories?
Sure, you might ask, who among us hasn’t cropped a random bystander out of a photo or retouched an image to get rid of a pimple or stray hair, or purged all traces of an ex on Instagram? How is the Magic Eraser any different? It’s just a little harmless editing.
Is it, though?
When Google offers you a tool to “fix” your photos, all of a sudden you start thinking about what might be wrong with them — and what might be wrong with you. In this way, the ads both embody and exacerbate two of the most pernicious effects that come from staring for hours at a small screen populated with profiles of your virtual self: self-absorption and self-loathing.
The predictable result is a narrowed, selfish worldview.
Other people become nothing more than a hindrance, an impediment to the perfect shot. That Speedo-wearing man at the pool or baby sticking out its tongue — to take two examples from the ad — are unfortunate intrusions into a scene’s imagined sanctity, rather than representations of the messiness and hilarity of life.
Old photos that bring up complex emotions or negative memories? No, they’re not a vessel for learning and growth — a part of one’s past, no matter how painful or regrettable. They’re simply another blemish to be erased.
The inevitable byproduct of this line of thinking is a culture ill-equipped to recognize and face reality. A culture with dwindling resiliency for life’s challenges and setbacks. And a culture with growing mental-health issues inflamed by the obsessive online curation of our lives and our obsessive comparison with the millions of other people doing the same thing.
We know about the immense, soulcrushing pressure many people feel to conform to the impossible beauty standards they see online. Instagram worsens body image issues for 1 in 3 teen girls and was the reported source of suicidal thoughts for 13 percent of teen users in the United Kingdom by one study, according to internal Facebook documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal. It also appears to have contributed to an uptick in cosmetic surgery. Social media apps such as TikTok appear to have worsened body image issues for boys, too, with some psychiatrists using the term “bigorexia” to describe the compulsion some young men feel to partake in excessive weightlifting and strict dietary regimens to look strong and fit online.
We know about the unprecedented mental-health challenges facing Gen Z youth, 25 percent of whom reported feeling emotionally distressed in a 2022 McKinsey survey — more than double the level reported by Millennials and Gen Xers and more than triple the level reported by Baby Boomers. The analysis also found that many Gen Zers first turn to social media when experiencing a behavioral-health crisis, seeking advice from other young people or therapists on TikTok, Reddit and Instagram.
And we know about the damage that social media images have wrought on the environment, with tourists crowding and often trashing picturesque cities and iconic natural landmarks, seeking to replicate photos taken by online influencers. Many of these photos portray their subjects as discoverers of a hitherto-unknown land, as solo travelers proprietorially surveying the scene spread out before them, a la Caspar David Friedrich — when in reality hordes of selfie-stick-toting people were waiting in line to snap a picture in the exact same spot and continue perpetuating the same illusion.
The desire to subvert reality — to create an alternate universe that resembles this one but is better — is understandable. But, at least on social media, subversion too often takes the form of sameness. In one of the Google Pixel ads, the Magic Eraser promises to help us efface our mistakes — little, big and huge. The funny thing is, though, that I would never have identified those “mistakes” as such. They were small quirks, imperfections and unplanned moments that set each photo apart, gave it a distinctive quality and feel, make it so that if you came across it 30 years later in an album, you’d know there was a good story behind it.
What Google is really suggesting we do is scrub away our individuality in pursuit of some ill-defined, homogenized and unrealistic — even impossible — conception of beauty, a good life, a good memory. But this attitude just makes reality — something we’re already collectively struggling to manage — even more difficult to deal with.
Our photos and memories don’t need fixing. It’s our self-perception that does. But that requires a whole lot more work than simply erasing something you want to pretend was never there.