When I’m curled up in bed at night and I want to reminisce, I go first to my screenshots folder, not my photo albums.
I believe that everyone collects something. Sometimes people’s beloved lots are obvious — when we visit my aunt in Taipei, we tease her for being unable to throw away any gift she has ever received. She is a former government official with big hair, which means the gifts are endless: expensive wines, jade sculptures, regional delicacies. Prominently displayed in her living room is a decorative pear with a lopsided portrait of her painted on it. Recently, when my aunt renovated, her daughter, desperate to seize on the opportunity to cleanse the apartment, asked to throw away a small Buddha statue that once belonged to my grandfather. My aunt told her to ask our grandmother, another collector, who told my exasperated cousin that for the sake of spiritual amity, she was allowed to dispose of the statue only in a rushing river.
Upon first glance, no one can tell what I collect. I am the kind of person who refuses to keep more than one plastic bag under the kitchen sink. I once gave away a candle because I already had two, which felt dangerously close to clutter. My hoard instead is digital: I collect screenshots. My screenshots folder on my phone is overspilling, out of sight only by the grace of technology, organized in a neat grid of squares that sit three across.
I’ve saved texts in which my mom wished me a happy birthday the day before my birthday; search results of the time I googled “when djd people start booing”; a message from a friend telling me, “woke up thinking about Anne Frank tik tok meme”; results from the time I googled “growing pumpkin in milk”; a still from the show “Terrace House” in which the subtitle reads “bagel burgers.” I have screenshots of a text thread in which my friend captioned a photo of Pharrell in his oversize hat “Every Los Angeles lesbian on hinge,” followed by a series of screenshotted dating profiles of women with names like Keely wearing big hats. I have screenshots of Daily Mail articles about Amelia Earhart to prove a friend’s point that “people still talk about her.” I made a montage with a moving soundtrack of screenshots of email responses I’ve received in my year as co-secretary of my union: “UNSUBSCRIBE”; “I don’t know what this is”; “Please do not have the audacity to send me unsolicited emails.”
So much of our digital world feels ephemeral by nature, passing by us at warp speed, but screenshots are like little fossils preserved in amber that allow us to slow down and capture pieces of our online lives. And if memories are what make us human, then our screenshots tell a story about who we are in the digital age. Think about Lois Lowry’s “The Giver,” in which the protagonist, Jonas, is saddled with the task of receiving all of human memory in order to be able to advise his community; if Jonas were to look through my screenshots folder, I’m certain he would have advised the town to give up on humanity immediately. But that’s OK. In many ways, your screenshots are like your nudes: personal and deployed for a select audience.
Our digital world feels ephemeral, but screenshots are like fossils preserved in amber that allow us to slow down.
In fact, what could be considered the first-ever screenshot, in 1959, was of a $238 million military computer. On its screen was not any sort of equation or tactical diagram but rather a rendering of a pinup girl. As a historical moment, this makes sense to me. If screenshots are a reflection of who we are, then there is nothing more universally human than appreciation for low-res smut.
When I’m curled up in bed at night and I want to reminisce, I go first to my screenshots folder, not my photo albums. Photos, which are often poised and polished, have a sense of exteriority to them; they are meant to be shown and shared. And the traditional methods of self-capture — a diary, a scrapbook — feel inadequate in the digital age, when so much of how we live happens online.
On the other hand, screenshots, which are usually taken during the quiet, intimate moments we spend navigating the world on our computers and phones, are hauled out from the messy internal guts of our private lives. Many of my screenshots were taken subconsciously and have long been forgotten about. Revisiting them is both delightful and humiliating — without them, so much of my existence would be forgotten, lost to the ethereal megabytes of the internet. I relish the chaos of my screenshots folder. “Surgeon!” I want to scream when I see all my terrible jokes and memes and receipts spilled out in front of me. “I can’t operate on this boy, he’s my son!”
There are some screenshots I return to more often than others. Nestled amid memes and subtweets is a screenshot of a text that I once sent in the August of a certain year, asking someone I loved in confusing ways whether she felt anything in return. I rarely think about this text anymore, but there was a time when I would pull it up at night and read her response over and over again. Repetition, I’ve found, always had a way of simulating truth.
Things are different now, less confusing, so I recently deleted the screenshot, which is, to no one’s surprise, often painful for me. I know some screenshots must go, but there is just something unceremonious about tapping on the little icon of a garbage can. I have this in common with the generations of collectors that have come before me. I understand what my grandmother means — for the sake of spiritual amity, I wish I could dispose of my beloved screenshots in a rushing river, too.
Clio Chang is a freelance writer based in New York covering politics, culture and media.
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