If Their Were a Spell Check for Memories

Nearly every writing teacher has a speech about spell check.

"Don't rely on spell check to proofread your document. It is a dumb machine..."

A lot of teachers will pull out one of the many clever "poems" that demonstrate how dumb spell check can be.  

It is an important lesson. Technology gives us tools that help us work; those tools cannot do the work for us.

I love that lesson.

I think of it whenever someone complains about how much their Facebook feed sucks or how stupid Twitter is or how Microsoft Word is horrible.

I just want to shake those people and tell them what their complaints sound like: "Why won't this screwdriver cut like a saw?"

But I don't shake those people. I get it. People often want software to do things it was not designed to do.

That is not unusual.

But I never expected the people who build that software would be the ones to overestimate what the software can do.

Facebook is 10 years old, and to celebrate they have created a program that mines your account to create a little slideshow.

If you use Facebook, I'm sure you've seen it. The program uses data from your Facebook account and assembles the first posts, the most liked posts, and a set of shared photos. Then it sets all of those images to a nice little tune.

The intention, I assume, is to walk users down a digital memory lane.

But there's a problem. Memories, much like words, do not always behave the way algorithms expect them to.

My Facebook movie, for example, reminded me that my "most liked post" of all time was this.

Three months after posting that, my wife and I lost the baby we were expecting. I didn't post anything about that on social media. It was a deeply personal loss that was already difficult enough to communicate about.

The few people who I did tell had to walk with me through an awkward etiquette-less exchange. Some people were incredibly helpful. Some people, understandably, fumbled for what to say.

It was a moment that had to be slogged through with messy human interactions.

We all worked together to understand how seven months of joy and excitement could become something so different.

Such is the nature of memories. They are made by, interpreted by, and re-interpreted by people. Even the happiest of memories are prone to drastic changes as they are put into the context of our ever-forward-marching experience.

I'm sure the Facebook Team had the best of intentions when they decided, "Hey, let's create an algorithm that will generate a mini-movie of pleasant memories for all our users."

But I think Facebook made the same mistake my students make when they use spell check to proofread:

They asked a computer program to do more than it is capable of.