Frames of Reference

When I wrote about learning languages I touched on the idea of a frame of reference, as defined by the period where your knowledge of pop culture is developed.  For most people in their native language their frame of reference tends to be from their early years of childhood through to their late teens, after this you only really experience pop culture in the moment, very little "sticks" as time passes beyond this period.  You witness pop culture evolve but only a few key events get retained, the rest only come to your recollection when someone else brings them up and even then if those moments weren't of any great importance or any great significance to you then they too can be easily forgotten.

It is in the nature of memory for human beings to be selective, there are techniques that you can use to help train your mind to retain certain things more than others but we can't gain explicit control over everything we remember, that's probably a good thing, if our use of technology and the state of our hard drives are anything to go by then some of the things we would hold onto if we could explicitly control our memory would be a complete waste of space.

The idea of "catching up" on a particular period of time however is something that interests me.  My Mum has a particular love of old Disney cartoons and movies both of which are surprisingly hard to find - Disney+ makes some of these available which I have explored, but the entire Disney back catalogue isn't easy to come by.  This isn't a problem unique to Disney, many other studios have the same problem when it comes to consumers who want access to their old content - services which most of said studios don't want to provide because they don't believe a large enough market exists to cover the cost, it's not commercially viable, which is the same reason why services like Netflix rotate content periodically rather than acquiring indefinite licenses for content.

There's a series of posts on this blog at the moment called Music Monday, these are 52 posts, 1 per week which are devoted to albums that I love, but even here the artists that feature are for the most part contemporary or within the last 20 or 30 years partly because accessing music that is older than this isn't as easy as you would think.  Even the contemporary music that is mentioned isn't covered by streaming services completely.  Many of the EDM albums in my music library for example are not on Spotfiy or Apple Music, some are only available via Amazon for purchase and many of those are only available as physical media with digital downloads unavailable. 

The idea of acquiring a frame of reference beyond that which we have lived through and experienced for ourselves is something that fascinates me.  Autobiographies often provide the best starting point if this is what you desire, by giving you an insight into life during that time period you build a foundation to build on as you explore.  The problem with this approach is that it falls flat when you get to periods in time where the selection of autobiographies to choose from is scarce.  It seems the same problem exists with modern and recent history as exists with ancient history and classical periods - that those who lived through them didn't have the forethought or the cognizance to recognise that others might one day be interested in that time period and what it was like "on the ground" as it were.  This extends to modern history even now in the present we live our lives but we do not document everything we do, even I am guilty of this as during lockdown I stopped posting on this blog, that wasn't because I didn't want to document what was happening though, it was simply because any and all motivation to write completely died.

For those who live their lives on Instagram, or Youtube, or Tik Tok, that isn't an accurate depiction of their lives, it can provide a glimpse but it can't be relied upon as a point of reference.  Likewise for those who live their lives on twitter we don't tweet every thought and feeling we have, such an act in itself would be exhausting.

We are selective when it comes to what we choose to document, just as our minds are selective of what they choose to remember, and as is the case with the latter, we often turn to the former in search of something and find there's no record of it because we never bothered recording it.  I don't use Facebook anymore.  I did for a time at University, for about 5 or 6 years documenting the 3 years of University and the first 3 years after graduation but I left the social network in the end because I recognised how invasive it was and how much it had integrated into my life and I did not like that.  For those that still use the social network however there are apps like Timehop which brings up moments from your past - this works with other social networks too, but the concept is simple, it takes an old post and presents it to you as a reminder of what you were doing however many years ago.  The trouble is this often lacks context because most statuses on sites like Facebook aren't all encompassing, tweets even more so, before the extension of the character limit they could be even more cryptic as to what they referred to.

The same problem remains throughout all of these sites, that the impression of your life they give others, and even the impression it gives you yourself many years later, is decided by what you had the forethought or the audacity to share as the case may be.  Anything implicit has the potential to be completely lost, with only that which is explicit retained and even then it can still stumble you as to what it meant. 

Beyond what I share online, for me personally encryption, cryptography, symbolism, and the ability to hide information inside information always appealed to me.  From made up languages and hand written fonts that were illegible to anyone but me, through to the encryption standard I developed for my dissertation the concept has persisted in my consciousness.  The trouble as with those memories mentioned above is that sans context the content that is contained within can be completely meaningless to us.  One particular document I created as a teenager now sits completely illegible to me because I haven't got a clue what I was thinking at the time when I created it. 

It would be nice if we could say that our frame of reference was something we could control but all this seems to prove to me is that the only part of it that you control is the bit you live through, everything beyond that is fluid and ultimately out of your conscious control, including our perception of our recollection, like trying to grab a fist full of sand on a beach, the harder you try to grasp it the quicker it slips away from you.