Vis a tergo

Social networks as distributed memory

Talk about social networking sites usually involves their affect on the here and now. Shared friends, shared tastes, and shared experience are usually given as their reason for existing. Yesterday I had an interesting experience with Facebook that showed me another use of these sites. They can be used as a memory amplifier.

Now, I don't know how often you get nostalgic with your friends, but I do quite often. Most of my friends are friends I've had since I was younger, so the conversation lends itself to nostalgia. One set of topics that have come up more than a couple times in the past is memories related to elementary school. Inevitably the subject of lunch boxes will come up.

I'm sure it was a nationwide phenomenon back in the 70s, so I don't think I need to go into the importance of picking your lunch box when you were under 10 years old back then. Were you a "Six Million Dollar Man" kid, or a "Hong Kong Phooey" kid? Did you want your warm Spaghetti-Os in a "Snoopy" thermos or a "Holly Hobby" thermos? Talk about decisions!

Whenever this discussion came up, I always had a faint memory of my very first lunch box in first grade ("Year 1", Kevin). Lunch boxes always had a theme, and the theme was usually a television show, but I could never remember the theme of my first lunch box. I had flashes of a double decker bus, a fat kid, a clubhouse, and a kid sliding down a fire pole. When trying to remember what the actual show was, I usually came to the conclusion that I was either misremembering something or confusing two different lunch boxes.

Enter Facebook. A former co-worker had joined a group on Facebook called "Unlike 99.99999999999% of the Facebook population, I was born in the 60s", so I clicked on the link to it to check it out. In the photo gallery it had a thumbnail for a picture that triggered some faint memory. The cryptic caption at the bottom says "double deckers cult veiwing". It had the fat kid. It had the bus. In addition, the dog and the guy in the suit and bowler hat looked familiar.

Off to Wikipedia. Search for "double deckers". It immediately takes me to an entry for "Here Come the Double Deckers". "...[a] TV series from 1970/1971 revolving around the adventures of seven children whose den was a red double-decker London bus in an old works yard." This had to be it!

Off to Google. Search for "Here Come the Double Deckers".

You're kidding me. A fan site for this show? A show that ran for 17 episodes. I gotta see this. Wow. A comprehensive fan site. With a "Collectibles" link. And what is there a picture of on the "Collectibles" page?

The Lunch Box! That's it. That's my first lunch box. It feels like the culmination of a sneeze that's been threatening for years. I am now delegating the memory of minutiae to Facebook. Don't ask me how an obscure British kids show became my choice for the subject of my first lunch box. Ask Facebook.

Comments closed due to comment spam

Posted by Rob at November 6, 2007 12:09 PM