Please Keep My Memories
Posted on November 29, 2014Sungmy Kim
My first online community was Chollian which was a PC communication network service in South Korea in 1999. After high-speed Internet was constructed, I used Freechal and Daum, which are Internet portal services, and started using Cyworld—similar to Myspace in the U.S.— from 2003. After using a smartphone, Kakao Talk—a mobile messenger app that the largest percentage of the Korean population use— and Facebook became my main online communication methods. The online communication services that I mentioned were general trends in Korea, and I followed the crowd to communicate with more people.
Korean Internet History by Popularity
An interesting point is that my online communities which were supporting offline communities have moved to new services based a popularity. For instance, my high school friends’ first online community was in Freechal. After we graduated high school, all of them started using Cyworld, so we created a new group page in Cyworld, and didn’t access Freechal anymore. After a few years, Cyworld didn’t reflect mobile network trends well, so we moved to Kakao Talk and Facebook, and didn’t use Cyworld again. Of course, we didn’t even talk about how to deal with our past networking records.
In hindsight, most traces of my networking activities since 2000 are stored online. I still keep the letters, notes, and diaries that I exchanged with my friends in childhood, but what about my digital photos, videos, and conversations that were not documented in tangible format yet? Who can say that they are stored in safe and sustainable spaces? I can access the online space anytime and anywhere, only until the company stops offering their online services. If I want to keep my memories as long as I can, I have to thoroughly back up my data, or may have to support the company economically for their permanent services. Freechal was an example of temporary service. Freechal was closed last year, and as a result, lots of content, including my online community, disappeared. One netizen sued Freechal for loss of his memories but lost the suit at last because the judge decided that the company doesn’t have responsibility to give chance to make a backup for their customers. In that respect, Facebook and Twitter are also temporary. People will move to new services again. If everyone moves, I have to follow them because the purpose of using those services is networking. However, the problem is, the people who are lazy or careless may lose their memories while moving to new spaces without making backups.
The second issue is that my memories are recorded not only between my communities, but also to the companies which offer the communication platforms to us. In other words, my information, my online activities, and my memories are impossible to keep as only mine. In the movie Her, the main character builds a strong relationship with a virtual girlfriend, but soon he is shocked when he realizes that his conversations with her are heard by the employees in the company which offers the service, and his virtual girlfriend has relationships with hundreds of other real people at the same time. Is it possible to have secrets online? We can see a serious online privacy problem through the recent case in South Korea. The Korean high police started examining Koreans’ Kakao Talk records because of increasing criticism towards the president, so angry Koreans sought refuge to Telegram, another mobile messenger which encodes every conversation instead of using Kakao Talk, which doesn’t encode. The companies which offer online networking services have the authority to make profits from people’s activities, but no one literally wants to share their private memories with them.
Third, my friendship between high school friends wasn’t damaged by moving online communication platforms because the online space was subsidiary. However, what about the communities that started online? The online communities which continued into offline gatherings built continuous bonds between community members. On the other hand, the relationships which didn’t connect to offline meetings were cut off after moving platforms. The relationships with the people who never met in reality are often considered too lightly, we may feel not only no obligation of contact, but also uncomfortable from these virtual relationships.
While keeping memories in virtual space, and losing lots of contacts and records by suspension of services for the last ten years, I would like to suggest new ideas to future services. My first idea is an easy backup service to create tangible records. The existing method of SNS backup is saving text or manually saving screen-captured images. Whereas this new type of backup service could make a digital booklet which contains a person’s networking records that the person wants to save. Absolutely the booklet has to keep the design and layout of the SNS. The digital booklet made this way can be printed for a tangible album or a story book. Some of my friends who use photo album services with digital photos every time when they travel, prove that there is a demand of tangible records from digital formats. This new backup service could also be good to store the deceased’s online records for their family or friends.
Another idea is a smart connection between services. Connecting functions already exist between different services such as photo uploading connections between Instagram and Facebook or using a Facebook account to join a new website. However, these functions are only for posting or signing up. Beyond them, we need better connections after we move to new services. For example, we might visit our past Myspace pages while using Facebook whenever we want. These ideas are only a start, but if we can build some new connections, we won’t need to worry about losing our online memories. I believe this idea is user-centered rather than service supplier-centered.