Open Questions and Challenges

The idea that the digital record of these memories could be altered raises questions about its contribution to collective memories. A digital record often serves as the authority of truth, what happens when that digital record is no longer reliable? We hope that this product transforms the permanent nature of digital records into a transient device of memory, exploring the pros and cons that comes with the universal ability to change the perception of history. 

The very extreme situation we briefly talked about is when this ritual is used for criminals. Another extreme scenario that one of the class students brought out was having a graduation album, which later turns out to be full of empty pictures of graduated students.

The reason why this extremely dystopian situation has surfaced is probably because there will be always dichotomous options for users, either 'someone completely not being there' or 'being there'. And relevant questions that we got during the presentation were being able to get rid of something semi-permanently and thus slowering the deletion process. This could be our future explorations. For technical portion, we can have opacity function for the deletion: people will have to scratch layers of pictures until complete deletion. We think this will bring a totally different mindset to people for their ritual of partial deletion. People will realize that the ritual requires them to make a lot of efforts for deleting someone, which will also allow people to carefully think about the digital artifacts they are creating and people in the pictures and to be reflective of its consequences.