The End of Forgetting by Kate Eichhorn

Author:Kate Eichhorn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press

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When Tagged Subjects Leave Home

For most people, leaving home—not simply their family home, but also the community where they grew up—is a pivotal moment. Not everyone has something to escape or a pressing need to reinvent themselves, but many people do. For some people, leaving home is synonymous with breaking away from tradition. For others, it is a way to escape an abusive environment, transcend their social class, or come out. In short, people leave home for multiple reasons and sometimes as a matter of survival. Leaving home, however, is not what it was in the past. Indeed, one of the most notable material consequences of the demise of forgetting may be the profound change it is having on the once taken-for-granted act of leaving home.

As social media networks expand, along with access to information about remote locations, physically leaving home may be easier now than ever before. Young people have new tools at their disposal to research their futures lives. Someone whose dream of attending a college on the other side of the country or the other side of the world, who might formerly have been thwarted by lack of information, can spend hours online researching potential schools and scholarship opportunities and even chatting with admissions counselors. This may be one reason why the out-of-state student population at public universities in the United States more than doubled between 1986 and 2016.1 But choosing a far-flung college is not the only option available to young people who wish to move away. Online platforms from Craigslist to SpareRoom also make it easy for adolescents to connect with new friends, potential roommates, and jobs in other locations nationwide and around the world. If a young person wishes to escape their small town or suburb, they no longer have to face the once daunting prospect of getting on a bus or train and showing up in a new city with nowhere to go but a local youth hostel. In the twenty-first century, they can carefully plan their escape and even set up a new life and social network long before they arrive in their desired destination.

Despite these conditions, however, other aspects of leaving home—especially the act of executing a complete and radical break with the past—have become more difficult. Just as the decline of forgetting has different stakes for different demographics, the difficulty of breaking away from the past affects different people in profoundly different ways. In a sense, we are now all tagged subjects—subjects whose movements can not only be easily tracked but whose past selves can be recalled and put back into circulation at any time. A person wanting to leave home and leave the past behind now faces two new and unique obstacles. First, there is the problem of slipping under the radar in the present. And second, there is the problem of preventing the past from attaching itself to the present. The structure of social media networks, facial recognition technologies, automated tagging, and emerging augmented reality applications are all converging in ways that may soon turn the experience of leaving home into a distant memory.

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