The disappearance of holding

The vanishing weight of experience in an age of disembodied media

Digitisation has changed the fundamental conditions under which we remember, possess, experience, encounter, and transmit things.

Today, much of what constitutes personal and cultural memory has been separated from the physical forms it once existed in, converted instead into information that is infinitely reproducible and remotely stored. We can see this transformation most clearly in the gradual displacement of the photograph by the camera roll, handwritten letter by digital message, record, cassette, and CD by streaming platforms, physical book by digital file, home video by cloud archive and, more broadly, in the steady displacement of material memory with their dematerialised equivalent.

These things have not necessarily ceased to exist, rather, their material presence has ceased to be the ordinary condition through which we encounter them.

The disappearance of holding describes something larger than the disappearance of analogue materials. It is about losing the physical conditions that made things capable of becoming meaningful to us. It describes the gradual removal of material friction from human experience.

Our memories remain, but they are no longer necessarily attached to objects. Our histories remain, but they increasingly exist inside systems we access rather than places and things we can inhabit.

Holding, in this context, is not simply to possess an object, but to allow something to remain materially present after the moment that produced it has passed. Holding gives memory a physical form. It gives experience somewhere to reside outside of ourselves, so that what might otherwise dissolve into recollection can remain present in the world. What is disappearing, then, is not simply a collection of obsolete technologies, but a particular material practice of remembering, preserving, and attaching ourselves to experience.

This distinction becomes clearer when we consider what happens when the things around us no longer need to be materially experienced. That difference changes the quality of the encounter. A physical thing cannot be experienced without occupying some portion of your body and your environment.

Digital information behaves differently.

It can be stored almost without occupying the world. It can be copied endlessly without becoming exhausted. It can remain perfectly intact while everything around it changes. Its existence can be separated almost completely from the physical circumstances in which it was created.

This is also why the word holding matters. Holding is not synonymous with owning. Ownership is a legal and economic relationship. Holding is physical and psychological.

The most significant condition a material life imposes is the construction of a personal world — space, effort, memory, identity, desire, scarcity, attention, maintenance, and risk of loss, all of which make certain psychological processes more likely to occur.

Those considerations forced our preference to become concrete.

Digital abundance removes many of those considerations, and in doing so, can separate preference from commitment on a significant scale. 

Storage and access become effectively limitless; we no longer have to decide what to keep with the same seriousness. We can keep everything.

Perhaps this is why digital abundance can feel strangely weightless. It allows us to accumulate unprecedented quantities of memory while leaving behind surprisingly little evidence of having lived them.

Digital interfaces are structurally indifferent to the formation of durable memory. They are optimised for retrieval, continuation, and replaceability rather than attachment, selection, and permanence. In removing the conditions that once required us to choose, preserve, and commit, they can make the formation of durable memory less likely to occur.

This has implications beyond memory itself. Human identity is not formed entirely in the present. We construct an understanding of ourselves partly by establishing continuity between who we were, who we are, and who we imagine ourselves becoming. We need some sense that our lives constitute a story rather than merely a sequence of disconnected moments. Personal material archives can provide that continuity. They make the accumulation of a life visible and more legible.

Digital systems, by contrast, are exceptionally efficient at introducing the new. There is always another image, another piece of music, another piece of information, another conversation, another recommendation, another thing to encounter. 

The problem is not necessarily that any individual encounter is harmful. It is that the continuous arrival of novelty makes it increasingly difficult to remain with anything long enough for familiarity, attachment, or meaning to take hold. We are continually moved forward before we have had the chance to settle into what is already here.

Holding works in the opposite direction.

It is repetitive. It allows us to live with the same things long enough for them to become familiar.

What digitisation changes is not simply the form in which things reach us, but the degree to which the material world participates in determining our relationship with them. The level of weight, scale, permanence, fragility, scarcity, location, and the effort required to acquire, preserve, move, repair, or eventually relinquish material objects all entered into the experience of possessing them. Materiality introduced resistance between wanting and having. That resistance was not incidental to the formation of meaning but part of the process through which meaning was formed. We had to make room for things, and in making room for them, we also made them part of the structure of our lives. Digital systems progressively abstract these negotiations away. They allow us to retain and access information without accommodating, selecting, preserving, and maintaining them. What disappears in that abstraction is not reducible to the physical object or even to the memory attached to it. It is the reciprocal process through which we once changed things by keeping them and were, in turn, changed by having to live with them. Their material persistence subjected experience to time, repetition, limitation, and consequence. When those conditions are removed, experience does not necessarily become less abundant, but differently constituted.

The question raised by the disappearance of holding is not whether we should return to material things, nor whether digital things can adequately replace them, but what happens to the formation of preference, attachment, memory, and selfhood when the material world no longer requires us to negotiate with the things we choose to keep.