Try to recall what you saw on social media the last time you scrolled. You’ll notice you can barely remember any posts, even if you scrolled for hours. This phenomenon has been confirmed by studies that have found that social media impairs both short-term and long-term memory. A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythical river in whose waters lost souls sought absolution, and received it in the form of oblivion.
— Gurwinder Bhogal, "Social media is engineering amnesia: We’re trapped in Big Tech’s mind maze"

Social platforms are quietly rewiring our relationship with time, creating what feels like an endless, eternal present. Each refresh wipes clean what came before, training us to live in an endless now that erases both past and future. See also the way AI chatbots reset their context window with each new session (though frontier models are now remembering past conversations, sometimes to creepy effect).

This temporal flattening echoes the way oral cultures experience time as cyclical rather than linear. But while oral traditions carefully preserved cultural memory through ritual repetition, social media's amnesia serves engagement metrics, not memory.

The algorithms that keep us scrolling are essentially attention traps that collapse time into an addictive stream of perpetual novelty. We're losing the ability to situate ourselves in longer arcs of collective meaning and memory.