Zach & Kevin return for Episode 5 of CCTea to discuss the phenomenon of mediating our memories through camera phones, social media and other digital locative tools. The mobility and ubiquity of these mobile technologies have facilitated their ability to serve as recording devices and memory makers, just like film cameras and handwritten diaries before them. It’s become so easy to document and chronicle our lives through snapshots and to stockpile all that data in cloud storage systems, but what are the ramifications of that process? What happens when that content-- our cherished memories-- gets lost, corrupted, or deleted? Does it become fragmented and lose some of its richness? Do we leave enough time to reflect on our memories, project our current self onto them, and commit them to long-term memory, or do we rely too heavily on outsourcing that cognitive load onto computers? Today, the tea will tell.

This discussion will feature an academic article called Record and Remember: Memory and Meaning-Making Practices Through Mobile Media (Ozkul & Humphries, 2015), a metaphor from Fortnite (the video game), a drowned phone, "food-stagramming" avocado toast, the paradox of nostalgia, and time wizardry. The full table of contents is below:


0:00 - Intro
1:00 - Ozkul & Humphries (2015)
1:45 - Locative Media: Foursquare Mayors
2:35 - Memory-Making: Capturing Time through Photos
5:05 - "Where Were You On..."
7:00 - Kevin's Slurp Juice (Fortnite) Metaphor
9:15 - Screenshots of Decontextualized Sentiments
11:45 - Hoarders: Digital Clutter
12:45 - Quantified Memories of a Camera Roll
13:30 - Zach's Drive to DC: A Drowned Phone & Deer
16:00 - Memory Fragmentation from Lost Content
17:20 - "Food-stagramming" & Other Utilitarian Photos
18:45 - Outsourcing Memories with Cloud Storage
24:05 - Text vs. Image: The Projection of Self
26:00 - Time Wizards & the Nostalgia Paradox
28:30 - Kevin's Cold Take
29:10 - Outro

Works Cited:
Özkul, D., & Humphreys, L. (2015). Record and remember: Memory and meaning-making practices through mobile media. Mobile Media & Communication, 3(3), 351–365. https://doi.org/10.1177/2050157914565846

Contact:
Zach Omer - zdo2@georgetown.edu
Kevin Ackermann - kaa128@georgetown.edu