How much does a memory cost?

By charging a monthly fee for “Memories,” Snapchat reminds users that human memory is finite

By: Virginia “Ginger” Gilbert

---

Credit: Kaspersky 

---

A selfie at a high school football game, a video of a roadtrip with people you haven’t seen in years, a picture of your late childhood dog - all frozen in time. Situated in columns and rows; a collage of something you thought you forgot. 

What dollar value do you place on the data that encompasses the past decade of your life? You might not have an answer, but Snapchat does.

In late September, the popular social communication and media platform broke the news about their latest update to their service: a payment plan for your “Memories” based on the amount of storage they take up on the app. 

---

Credit: Twitter/X @souvenirstiles

---

The fury was tangible. How is it possible that a company could charge you to keep your own memories? How could they decide that–after years of acting as a secondary camera roll–you now must pay to reminisce on your own life? 

Though it feels that you hold a certain jurisdiction over your personal photos, videos, and chats, the reality is that your data is owned in part by whatever entity you entrust with it. 

When they outlined this policy, Snapchat didn’t consider what they were communicating to their users: your data isn’t yours anymore. The boundaries between social media and lived existence are broken and, once you connect your sense of self to an entity with no inherent sense of reality, your assumption that an LLC will always act on consumer preferences is a naive risk. 

These platforms have always put a price tag on your data—your photos, texts, videos, comments—they just didn’t foot the bill to you. Now, you have to decide if the sentimental value of your photos and videos is worth between $2 to $16 a month. 

In all fairness, Snapchat is absolutely entitled to expect payment for the data management service they are providing. Does it feel extremely capitalistic, opportunistic, cold, and calculated? Yes. 

Is it a completely radical or industry-changing precedent? Not really. In the past, we have always had to pay for digital cameras, photo prints, VCR recordings, and–more relevantly–iCloud data. 

So what is the difference between the public’s perception of paying for iCloud storage versus paying for “Memory” shortage? 

Whether consciously or not, the public has built an emotional resonance with the idea of Snapchat “Memories” as an extension of neurological memories. To introduce the idea that users now have to pay for a memory feels less like the reasonable service-based transaction that Snapchat had in mind and more like a threat to the sentiment of one’s past.

It reads as, “If you do not pay me, I will take away your memories” (very Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), and is an uncomfortable reminder that none of the tech or social media platforms we have integrated into our daily lives are within our control. 

Let’s be real: if we think logically, we have no reason to be mad at Snapchat for expecting payment for a service. In fact, we aren’t mad at Snapchat at all. We are mad at the digital entanglement we have collectively imposed upon ourselves by becoming dependent on a bunch of branded coding.

When platforms decide their profit margins are no longer sustainable, they make business decisions which remind us of just that: this is not sustainable. 

When consumers became emotionally invested in the idea of saving “Memories,” this service was free to users. However, Snapchat has grown as a platform since then. With over 900 million monthly users, Snapchat has become a photo storage platform of its own with over 1 trillion “Memories” saved over the past decade. 

Just like storing data is not free, the public’s integration of our lifestyles with inhuman language models also comes at a cost. It forces us to conceptualize something that is beyond human understanding: this time, the tangible value of your memories. 

How does one even begin to prioritize or conceptualize that value? How much would I pay to remember everything? Is there somebody I can pay to forget some of it? 

Here's the big picture: humans were never intended to know so much about ourselves.

In the early onset ages of photography and videography, somebody may have only had one or two pictures of themselves in a lifetime. Now, you can take, send, and save a photo of yourself at any point, time, or place. There is no limit on how much you can record of your life, how much you can try to remember.

I figure this simply cannot be good for us. Human memory is one of the most delicate aspects of our being. It is a complex, highly conceptual neurological process tied to a vulnerable sense of consciousness that identifies us with our human nature, and there is an uncomfortable boundary crossed when we try to extend the capabilities of our human consciousness through platforms of data collection like Snapchat.

Rather than relying on our own consciousness to retain and process information, we can now delegate some of that responsibility to a third party that allows us to infinitely record every detail of our existence. 

As I considered this among all other aspects of Snapchat’s decision, I wondered if the extreme emotional reaction from the public had anything to do with an insecurity in our memory after depending on our phones for so long. 

According to an article published by Vox, it is extremely possible. In Brian Resnick’s deep dive into the impacts of smartphone photography, he describes how the process of “cognitive offloading” (a process in which the brain alleviates its internal accountability to hold information by delegating the responsibility to a different source) is accelerated and contextually changed by our use of smartphones. 

When computers first became commonplace, cognitive offloading was typically only associated with tedious processes or detailed information (i.e. friends’ birthdates, family home addresses, etc.). 

However, with the rise in accessibility to and intelligence of our smartphones, it has become associated with more interpersonal information, for example, situational memories. 

A different study published by the National Library of Medicine (NIH) on cognitive offloading supports the idea that the process can diminish participant memory. As described by Resnick and the NIH study, cognitive offloading can be a positive thing when it acts as a mechanism to make room for more important, analytical information. 

But what happens when we begin to expect our phones to become vehicles for the human experience? 

Think about the last time you lost or broke your phone: Did I save everything to my iCloud? Oh my God, all my pictures, my texts. Are they all gone?

We have an emotional response to the data our phones hold because it has become an extension of our consciousness. Changes in our ability to access our data make us feel vulnerable because we feel comfortable with the idea that we have a backup hard drive for our brains that fits in our pockets. 

It makes us feel like we don’t ever have to forget anything; we never have to let go of any of it. Memory is no longer a fleeting gift, but a commodity you can invest in by building a second consciousness elsewhere. 

We offload the burden of memories we see as mundane or unimportant to the extent that we rely on a third-party data source to spark a recall for that or other related situations. It is normal to forget the little things, but we no longer feel we should have to. In attempting to balance data storage and profit margins, Snapchat incidentally reminds their users that their human memory is a finite resource. 

So, Snapchat poses the question: if you had to buy them all back, how much would a memory cost?

---

Virginia “Ginger” Gilbert is a Finance major at the University of Florida from Jupiter, FL. She posts on her private story one million times a day.