Assessing the Impact of Digital Memory on Children and Adolescents 

Role: Principal Investigator

Timeline: 2016-2019

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This project began when public debates about youth and social media were focused largely on screen time, internet safety, and content moderation. These frameworks, while important, didn't capture a more fundamental shift occurring at the level of platform design: the transition from a culture built on forgetting to an infrastructure engineered for permanence. This study examined how digital platforms change the experience of growing up by diminishing the once-natural capacity to forget one's younger self and to have that version of oneself forgotten by others.

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Key Questions

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• How are digital platforms altering the ability of children and adolescents to outgrow and distance themselves from their past?

• How do specific digital infrastructures impact the ability to control what we remember and forget and how and for what duration we are remembered by others?

• What are the psychological and social implications for young users when their past identities remain permanently accessible?

• How are various institutions, including the family, schools, and tech companies, reshaping memory practices through their oversight (or lack of oversight) of platform dynamics?

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Methodology

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This interdisciplinary study relied on multiple methods, including historical research, policy research, qualitative interviews, policy analysis, and observations. This interdisciplinary and mixed-methods approach was optimal given that social media platforms and public concerns about children's and adolescents' use of these platforms were rapidly evolving between 2016 and 2018 while research for the study was taking place.

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Study Design

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• Platform Analyses: I examined the architectures and retention policies of major social networks to understand how youth data persisted and circulated.

• Historical Research: As a point of comparison, I explored how remembering and forgetting functioned in an analog era, with a focus on how analog photography and home movies sought to preserve memories of childhood but only in a highly curated manner.

• Interdisciplinary Literature Review: I drew on theoretical insights from developmental psychology, sociology, media, and childhood studies to contextualize platform effects.

• Policy & Technical Landscape Mapping: I analyzed evolving privacy regulations and default biometric data and content retention practices.

• Qualitative interviews: I carried out a select number of qualitative interviews about growing up in an era of social media with young people, ages 18-22 (at the time of the study, this meant people born between 1995 and 2000). ​

 

Sampling

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The interviews functioned as a qualitative supplement to the book’s broader framework. Participants were selected on the basis of availability and relevance to the topic, using a convenience sampling approach.   

Key Insights 

• Data persistence has fundamentally reshaped childhood: The research showed that long-term data storage and searchability are altering how identity, memory, and development function for young people.

• Forgetting as a developmental capacity has been eroded by platform design: Systems optimized for permanence undermine children’s and adolescents' ability to leave the past behind.

• Memory is becoming infrastructural rather than personal: Children’s and young adults' histories are increasingly shaped by platform architectures, algorithms, and data-retention policies.

• Automated resurfacing produces involuntary continuity: Features such as tagging, “memories,” and facial recognition repeatedly reintroduce past content into the present, prompting us to re-encounter memories that would have likely been forgotten or even repressed in the past.

• The burdens of permanent visibility are unevenly distributed: The risks related to having more parts of one's childhood or adolescent remembered are not evenly shared by all young people.

• The central crisis is the loss of erasability, not innocence: Media theorists, parents, and lawmakers once worried that new media technologies were leading to the "end of childhood"; this study suggests the real risk isn't a loss of innocence but rather the inability to forget.

• Youth data governance requires new design paradigms: Technology companies default to preserving digital footprints but, especially for young people, there are compelling reasons that product and policy design should default to meaningful deletion. 

 

Impact 

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The book published based on this study, The End of Forgetting, offered a new framework for understanding childhood and adolescence in a digital era. It provided language, concepts, and evidence that helped stakeholders recognize that forgetting is a crucial developmental need; platform design choices—not just user behavior—determine whether forgetting is possible. The study further emphasized the urgent need for tech companies to modify existing platforms to build more ethical, youth-centered systems and ones designed for forgetting.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

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