I’ve been trying to pay more attention to the phrasing and wording of things in addition to the design of things. As visual (or like extra-visual? as in fingerprint logins or facial recognition) elements continue to replace textual ones, I’m interested in the rarity of them and therefore (supposedly, if we believe in scarcity) their increased significance. So when my phone tells me that I “have a new memory,” I realize that there’s a lot going on. I can accept “memories” as another corporately co-opted intimate symbol (“friends” “connections” etc.), but I also think about the sci-fi future of how actual human memory will exist down the line. Lots of folks have already extrapolated this to utopic or dystopic (Total Recall comes to mind), but we’re also already there. When I try to recall a moment to share with someone, sometimes I start by scrolling back through my phone’s photos to try and get to that period of my life.
