Performativity of the Present

Throughout the vast majority of human existence, our experiences were fleeting, vanishing nearly as rapidly as they occurred.  A family gathering ended and survived only in memory. A sunset faded beyond the horizon and was gone. A traveller visited a distant city, returned home, and recounted the journey through stories that grew less precise with each retelling. Human beings understood that moments were temporary. That impermanence was not viewed as a flaw. It was simply part of life. Today, nearly every experience can be preserved. Smartphones have placed cameras in the pockets of billions of people, enabling instant photography and video sharing with audiences worldwide. A birthday party, a holiday, a concert, a meal, or even an ordinary afternoon walk can now be documented within seconds. At first glance, this appears to be a technological achievement. Yet, it also marks the moment we became the directors, actors, and audiences of our own lives, turning every fleeting instance into a production. Humanity has solved one of its oldest limitations: the inability to preserve the present. Why rely on memory when technology allows us to record almost everything?

Yet there is a strange contradiction at the centre of modern life. The more capable we become of documenting our experiences, the less capable we often seem of fully inhabiting them. Consider a concert. Thousands of people gather to hear live music. Yet when the performance begins, hundreds of phones immediately rise into the air. Many audience members watch the event on a screen while standing only metres from the stage. Similar scenes occur at sporting events, tourist attractions, weddings, and even family dinners. Increasingly, people are not merely participating in experiences. They are simultaneously documenting them. The smartphone screen becomes a literal frame—a proscenium arch that separates the participant from the experience, turning the lived event into a curated performance for the invisible audience waiting behind the lens.

This shift reflects a bigger psychological change. Historically, photographs functioned primarily as records of the past. They were stored in albums, framed on walls, or shared among close friends and family. Social media transformed this relationship. Platforms such as Instagram and TikTok turned documentation into public performance. The purpose of a photograph gradually shifted from remembering an event to displaying it. As a result, many experiences are now viewed through the lens of a potential audience. Rather than asking, "Am I enjoying this?" people often find themselves asking, consciously or unconsciously, "How will this look?" The experience becomes intertwined with its presentation.

Sociologist Erving Goffman argued that social life resembles a theatrical performance. Individuals present different versions of themselves to different audiences, carefully managing impressions and behaviours. While this tendency existed long before the internet, social media has expanded dramatically in scale. The audience is no longer limited to friends, colleagues, or neighbours. It may consist of hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people. This constant awareness of observation can alter how individuals experience reality itself. Psychologists refer to a related phenomenon as self-objectification, a process in which people begin viewing themselves from an external perspective. This external perspective is the hallmark of the 'performative present.' We cease to be the subject of our own experiences and instead become the objects of a public performance, perpetually adjusting our 'script' to satisfy the imagined expectations of an audience. Instead of existing within an experience, they become spectators of their own lives. Attention shifts away from the immediate moment and towards evaluating how that moment appears from the outside.

In a sense, many people now carry an invisible audience with them wherever they go.

This dynamic helps explain why certain experiences increasingly feel incomplete unless they are shared. A holiday destination is photographed before it is explored. Food is arranged before it is eaten. A moment of celebration is interrupted by the need to capture evidence of it. Documentation no longer follows experience. It often accompanies it from beginning to end.

The irony is that the very act of recording a moment may weaken our connection to it. Research on memory suggests that people sometimes remember less about experiences they extensively photograph. Psychologists describe this as the "photo-taking impairment effect." When individuals rely on cameras to preserve information, they often pay less attention to the details unfolding before them. The brain effectively delegates part of its memory function to the device.

This reflects a broader process known as cognitive offloading. Human beings frequently use external tools to reduce mental effort. Calendars remember appointments. Search engines remember facts. Smartphones remember phone numbers. Photography increasingly performs a similar role for personal experiences. Rather than storing memories internally, people rely on digital archives to store them externally.

The consequence is subtle but significant. Moments become collected rather than absorbed.

There is another force at work as well. Social media platforms operate within what economists and media scholars call the Attention Economy. Human attention is a limited resource, and digital platforms compete aggressively to capture it. Photographs and videos do not simply preserve experiences; they become units of social currency. Likes, views, comments, and shares provide immediate feedback about how successfully an experience has been presented. Over time, this can blur the distinction between living and performing. Activities that generate stronger reactions online may begin to receive greater priority offline. Experiences become selected not solely because they are meaningful, but because they are shareable. The French philosopher Guy Debord anticipated aspects of this transformation decades before the rise of social media. In The Society of the Spectacle, he argued that modern societies increasingly replace direct experience with representations of experience. Images begin to mediate reality. People encounter the world not as participants but as observers. The smartphone has brought this process into everyday life.

This does not mean that photography, social media, or documentation are inherently harmful. Photographs preserve family histories. Videos capture important milestones. Digital platforms allow people separated by vast distances to remain connected. These technologies provide genuine benefits. The issue is not that experiences are recorded. The issue emerges when recording becomes the primary purpose of the experience itself.

A photograph should ideally be a by-product of a meaningful moment. Increasingly, the moment risks becoming a by-product of the photograph.

Despite these trends, a persistent human desire for unmediated experience remains. People continue to seek activities that pull them away from constant observation. Long walks without phones, digital detoxes, mindfulness practices, and retreats all suggest a growing recognition that something valuable may be lost when every moment becomes content. Individuals still crave experiences that are theirs alone. There is a profound irony in the modern pursuit of perfect documentation. Human beings developed technologies to preserve memories because memories fade. Yet in our attempt to capture everything, we risk creating distance between ourselves and the very moments we wish to preserve. We become archivists of our own lives rather than participants within them. Perhaps the central challenge of modern life is not deciding what should be recorded. That task has become effortless. The greater challenge is deciding what should remain unrecorded. For most of history, countless meaningful moments vanished without photographs, videos, or audiences. A conversation between friends. A quiet walk at dusk. A laugh shared between family members. No record survives of these experiences, yet their value was never diminished by their disappearance. In a world defined by the performativity of the present, the most radical act is one that goes unrecorded. The rare ability to experience something fully, without the burden of staging it for an audience, is becoming the most valuable form of freedom.

Some Ideas

• Cognitive Offloading: reliance on external tools (like digital archives) to store information rather than internal memory.

• Erving Goffman’s Theatrical Sociology: The idea that social life is a performance where individuals manage impressions for an audience.

• Photo-taking Impairment Effect: Research suggests that taking photographs can weaken memory retention of an event.

• Self-Objectification: The psychological process of viewing oneself from an external, observed perspective.

• Society of the Spectacle: Guy Debord’s concept regarding the replacement of direct experience with representations (images). 

The outsourcing of memory

People have always stored large amounts of information in their minds, before the advent of library systems, cloud storage, and technological innovations. Farmers would have to remember when to plant crops, when the weather would change, and be aware of the nuances of the land they cultivated. Sailors had to become acquainted with the stars as they travelled across oceans, learning to use them as guides through years of observation. To make a profit, merchants kept track of prices, debts, trade routes, and customers mentally. Countless cultures passed down their histories orally through storytelling, song, ritual and oral tradition. Forgetting something could mean financial loss, social humiliation, navigational error or in some cases, death. However, because memory is not a perfect entity, many people readily accepted that it was flawed. Each time people remembered a story, they would slightly alter it; sometimes, details would fade, and how we view events would change over time. Because of this, no one thought of memory as an infallible record, because memory did not exist merely to preserve information but also to remember what is important. . Human beings also understood that remembering requires selecting, interpreting, and creating meaning from the past; therefore, the past exists because of the rememberer.

Modern advancements have changed the relationship between human beings and their surroundings; the extent of these changes would seem uncanny to past generations. Nowadays, there is an external way to store nearly all the information we use on a regular basis; our phones hold onto our birthdays, passwords, appointments, routes, grocery lists, and contact information, and Google can return relevant facts in seconds. Cloud storage will allow someone to keep their pictures, text messages, word documents, and videos indefinitely. Through this technological creation, humanity has created a massive external memory system in the form of a digital extension of our brain that will allow us to carry this extension wherever we go. At first glance, one might perceive this as one of the most remarkable intellectual accomplishments in history. Why take the time to remember how to get to a location when you can use GPS for turn-by-turn directions? Why remember a phone number when your address book contains thousands? Why try to remember everything that happened during a vacation when your picture gallery contains hundreds of pictures of everything that you experienced (dinner, attractions, sunsets, etc.)? Psychologists refer to this behaviour as cognitive offloading, in which people shift the burden of mental tasks onto external devices. Cognitive offloading has been practised by people throughout history (writing things down is an example). So are calendars, notebooks, atlases, and filing cabinets. Humans have always invented new technologies because they reduce the cognitive work individuals need to perform. The difference today is not the existence of these tools but their scope. Earlier technologies supported memory. Increasingly, modern technologies replace it. Many people can still recite a childhood friend's telephone number despite not using it for twenty years, yet struggle to recall the number of someone they speak to every day. The information exists. It simply exists elsewhere. The device remembers so that the individual no longer needs to. 

There may be an even bigger change in knowledge than in memory. For the most part, throughout history, it was difficult to obtain knowledge/answers. If a person wanted an answer, they would regularly have to go through a multi-step process. They may need to consult a book, search through an archive, find a professional expert, or spend a lot of time reading, reflecting, and/or considering the information they have found. Because of the demands and frustrations of locating the information, they developed a holistic understanding of the subject. The facts they knew were related to other facts. The ideas were built on their previous knowledge. Over time, a significant, consistent view of the world was developed. The internet has dramatically changed this way of learning. You can find an answer to nearly any question in seconds. While this efficiency is fantastic, it creates a false sense of security that leads to the phenomenon researchers define as the Google Effect or Digital Amnesia. When people know they can find information with minimal effort later, they are much less likely to retain it; instead, they know where to find it. Our memory is based on where we can find it, rather than where in the brain we stored the answer. This adaptation is efficient for several reasons – the brain is appropriately adapting to its environment. Search engines can help you find information; however, they do not directly format that information. Merely knowing where to look for a given fact is very different from recognising how that fact can connect with the other hundreds of facts. Just because a historian knows historical dates does not mean they are an expert historian. A scientist is much more than just a data collector. When it comes to expert knowledge, it develops through building bridges among concepts or by having isolated data. The greatest hazard of having lots of information is not a lack of information but rather a false sense of possessing knowledge. In all of history, there has never been such a large quantity of information available to our society, yet so many people cannot turn it into truthful understanding. The present time has no shortage of information available to us; however, there is a huge deficit of people able to pay attention to it. Therefore, we must remember that although many people have access to abundant data, we are currently experiencing a shift in the density of information, from an access-based economy to one based solely on interpreting and understanding the data to develop additional innovative solutions for the future.

People today have moved beyond simply saving memories and are now documenting them directly. For most of the 20th Century, photographs were relatively hard to come by due to high film prices and lengthy development times; as a result, people tended to reserve photographs for special occasions (e.g., weddings, anniversaries, family reunions, holidays, and important life events). Most life memories went undocumented and lived only in memory. Today, this has reversed completely; average smartphone users can take thousands of photos every year without any cost or limitations on their phone use. Now, entire lives are stored in extremely detailed archives of memory. People take photos of their meals before eating; people hold up their phones to watch concerts from above the crowd; visitors stream to popular tourist sites only to be obscured by crowds of arms in the air, taking pictures of sights they haven't even looked at yet. Future historians will likely have a much clearer and more complete visual record of everyday people living in the 21st century than of any people or events in the past. Historians will be able to see what food people ate, which animals were kept as pets, where people went on vacation, and how many times individuals photographed sunsets. What future historians will probably not be able to tell is whether those taking the photos while they were there were actually paying attention to their surroundings. Studies on the photo-taking impairment effect suggest that recording an event can often disrupt memory of the experience itself because your attention is drawn away from the memory to taking a picture of it. You have replaced experiencing the moment with experiencing the act of preserving the moment through photography. This has created a strange paradox. Today, people have more records of their lives than any generation before them. However, many people can no longer remember their lives at all if they cannot use their phone or camera to do so. There are thousands of photographs stored in digital files, sorted by date, place, and facial recognition, but most are never even looked at. We have built large museums of personal memorabilia, but we never visit them.

The greatest impact of this shift may be seen when the concept of identity rests on that of memory. From the beginning of time, human beings have connected their personal identities to stories about themselves and others. Memories do not simply exist in isolated pieces of information; rather, they are connected to form, out of these experiences, an individual's identity, where we began and how we have been shaped into who we are at a given moment in time. Memories such as those from childhood, family traditions, successes/failures, relationships, regrets, and turning points all connect to form a narrative that identifies who we are, where we are going in life, and provides continuity from the past through the present into the future. These individual narratives of memory answer a question that unites humanity: "Who am I?" Digital technology does an excellent job of preserving a record of information about memory, however it does not do the same with creating a narrative - Digital technology stores a record or record of data in a database, but does not create meaning, so for example; if I attempt to use my smartphone to locate where I was at 7 years ago on an April afternoon, I can find out exactly where I was, however, it does not provide me with a reason as to why that day was significant to my life. Likewise, a cloud archive may contain every digital photograph from a family vacation, yet it would not necessarily enable recreating the emotion felt during a conversation that occurred on that journey. The process of developing meaning involves reflecting upon, interpreting, and reconstructing memories in the absence of them. Paradoxically, one of the greatest components in reconstructing events is the absence or forgetting of the event, as modern culture considers the act of forgetting to be bad and corrects it with more advanced technology, or more storage options, and so on. Forgetting is not simply the negative aspect of our memory; rather, it is one of the most significant factors in developing meaningful connections to the events recorded in our memories.

Forgetting forces selection. Selection creates emphasis. Emphasis creates narrative. Narrative creates identity. Without forgetting, memory would become an indiscriminate archive in which everything had equal importance, and nothing had significance. The irony of the digital revolution is that our society has essentially solved the technical problem of storing information in an archive for future access; we have far more storage capacity than humans have ever had. Everything we send/receive in terms of email messages, photos, GPS positions, and paperwork will exist for as long as there is a physical archive to keep it. Simply storing information in an archive was never the ultimate hurdle; the real challenge has always been converting that information into understanding, and, through experience, into the creation of meaning. The digital world can create copies of the past with incredible fidelity. It, however, cannot choose which parts of the past should receive a permanent place in an individual's life story. Ultimately, that responsibility remains, and perhaps still is, completely, and perhaps somewhat, comforting, a human function. Therefore, the question for our digital generation is not how to remember more. It is how to remember well. Because information can be stored forever, but meaning still has to be made.

Some concepts (click on the titles for more):

• Adaptive Forgetting: The neurological and psychological necessity of forgetting. It explores how forgetting non-essential information helps the brain prioritise important data, generalise concepts, and prevent cognitive overload.

• The Attention Economy: The concept that human attention is a scarce commodity. In an age of infinite information, wealth and power shift toward those who can capture and hold attention, rather than just provide data.

• Cognitive Offloading: The reliance on external devices (like smartphones and notebooks) to reduce the mental effort required to remember information or perform tasks.

• Digital Hoarding / Personal Archiving: The reluctance to delete digital files and the modern phenomenon of amassing massive digital archives (photos, emails, texts) that are rarely or never revisited.

• The DIKW Pyramid (Data, Information, Knowledge, Wisdom): A framework used in information science to illustrate the transformation of raw data into structured information, then into understood knowledge, and finally into applied wisdom- perfectly mirroring the argument about the deficit of understanding in the information age.

• The Extended Mind Thesis: A philosophical concept (popularised by Andy Clark and David Chalmers) arguing that cognitive processes do not just happen in the brain, but extend into the physical environment and the tools used (like smartphones functioning as an external brain lobe).

• The Google Effect (Digital Amnesia): The tendency to forget information that can be easily found online using internet search engines.

• Narrative Identity: The psychological theory that individuals form an identity by integrating their life experiences into an internalised, evolving story of the self, which provides life with a sense of unity and purpose.

• The Photo-Taking Impairment Effect: How photographing an event can diminish one's ability to recall the experience, shifting attention from the moment to its documentation.

• Transactive Memory Systems: A psychological hypothesis about how groups (and now, humans and their digital devices) collectively store and retrieve knowledge, essentially dividing the labour of remembering.

• The Transition from Oral to Written Culture: How humanity's relationship with memory and truth shifted when moving from oral storytelling to the printing press, serving as a historical parallel to the current digital shift.