Remembering memories.

I'm currently writing an assignment for my New Media and Digital Cultures university paper where we have to compare two readings from a particular week of the course so far. I chose the week of memory, where we discussed things like remediation, nostalgia and hauntology. (I'll leave a really interesting link explaining a bit more about hauntology, here)

One of the readings was all about the concept of prosthetic memories, and this really interested me, and got me thinking. Prothetic memory is where we remember things we did not actually experience, that are, in a sense, implanted memories. This concept pops up in movies from time to time, including Inception, The Thieving Hand, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Blade Runner. It's kind of a futuristic concept, but I think aspects of it are present in our lives, well, in mine at least.

My parent's filmed a lot of my sister and my childhood's, from the big adventures to the mundane things, a lot of it was caught on film. Every so often we'll sit down and watch a bunch of home movies together, and essentially i'd watch myself grow up. They'll be certain things that i'll 'remember' when watching the tapes, but i'm not sure if I remember them actually happening, or if I remember watching them happen. 

Still with me? I guess it just fascinates me that, at some stage of our lives, we were consciously making decision that have possibly affected who we are today, yet we have no memory of actually making those decisions. Instead they have been overwritten by something else. I guess this is why we film parts of our lives, and take photographs, because we rely on these memories to validate our experiences. 

So I guess back to the "do I actually remember this memory or do I remember watching the video of this memory" question, does anybody else have this? Or is it just me?

In short, i'm semi-geeking-out about this assignment, and needed to have a bit of a brain dump. Prothetic memory does seem a bit 'out there,' but at the same time, entirely possible in our lovely, ever improving technological lives. Especially if sold to advertising companies to make us lifelong, loyal customers - agree?