Has Summer Ever Really Felt Like Summer?
On Media Warping Memories
I - and the rest of the world it seems - have spent the past couple of months viewing a teen romance series chock full of sweet and clumsy moments between fictional teens in a summer love triangle. While many series may come to mind, the one in question is the one-and-only The Summer I Turned Pretty. Based on the book series by To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Jenny Han, the show follows young protagonist Isabel “Belly” Conklin navigating love and loss on the East coastline with longtime friends turned crushes Conrad and Jeremiah Fisher, who also happen to be brothers.
It’s easy to see why the show has garnered a significant fanbase, with its soundtrack riddled with freshly re-recorded Taylor Swift tracks and its Twilight-esque “Team Conrad” vs. “Team Jeremiah” branding that’s overtaken TikTok and American Eagle retail stores. Such attributes are practically written for fan deliberation and virality. Nonetheless, there is also a tender awkwardness between the characters, and a distant, painful air of summer nostalgia wove through the show that makes it all the more intoxicating. The flirting is often bumbling in a way that makes you scrunch up your nose and giggle. The setting of a summer house in Cousins Beach, Massachusetts is somehow familiar and endearing, even to those who didn’t grow up “summering” on the East Coast.
As a non-teenage viewer of the show, there’s a feeling of longing for the summers of childhood attached to the series - when brushing elbows with your crush at the beach or eating muffins overlooking an ocean from your summer house was surely in-store. The funny thing is that those summers never actually existed for me - at least not in totality. Most often, summers like that lived solely on the pages of my books or the screen of my home television. And yet, I find myself looking back on them with fondness - but what exactly am I looking back to?
Growing up, summer was a bit of a bittersweet pill. I was always ecstatic about receiving a break from school and three months filled with swimming pools, ice cream cones, and boat rides across lakes. However, without a driver’s license for many years and a non-working parent to drive me around town, more days than not my summers were spent bouncing between my bed and the living room couch. Of course, I did have some ice cream and a few jumps in the lake - but nothing came close to the highlight adventure reel documented in movies like Aquamarine (2006), The Parent Trap (1998), High School Musical 2 (2007), and more. Many summer days were spent parked in front of the television watching those exact films, and later with a phone in hand, on which I scrolled through images of friends attempting to project the same classic, cinematic summer experience we all assumed we should have.
So many days spent feeling suffocated by boredom, and yet, when I look back, I still remember that feeling of excitement. My brain may be self-selecting - only picking the worthwhile moments for my mental summer supercut. Perhaps now that I’m an adult and don’t receive a lengthy summer break, I long for the big open spans of time that filled my childhood summer days. Still, I think that the media I consumed during this period - and even since then - has also undoubtedly colored my memories of summers passed.
One day in my childhood, I was shown a photograph and home video of my second birthday party. I was wearing a green dress covered in pink strawberries and my parents blew up a bouncy house for children to jump around in our backyard. My birthday cake was a rectangular vanilla one of the grocery store variety, with a three-dimensional Elmo frosted on. I was likely shown this photo and video when I was an elementary schooler and to this day I can’t tell if I truly remember the event documented, or only remember the photo and video of the event.
Much research has been conducted on media’s impact on our memory. In a study led by Diana Tamir of Princeton University, students were asked to record their experiences of an event (either through taking photographs, writing about it, or posting about it on social media). Tamir and her team found that recording the experience didn’t affect how much people enjoyed or engaged with it, but it did impact how much they remembered it. Those who photographed, wrote about, or shared their experiences online performed 10% worse on memory tests following the event.
The researchers concluded that the participants' memories likely weren’t affected due to media usage interrupting their experience, but rather because the recording of the event via words on paper or images on a smartphone externalized the experience from themselves. When reproducing the event, their brains surrendered aspects of the original experience, allowing them to exist on extraneous sources for later retrieval.
For Time, Andrew Gregory discusses how these findings are supported by additional research on transactive memory - or how humans divide information between internal storage - what we decide to remember - and external storage - what memories are stored outside of ourselves, whether they’re written on paper, recorded on film, or suspended on social media feeds. Before the internet, in particular, it was trickier for people to externalize most of their memories, and knowledge in general. Sure, there was good old paper and pen, but paper records needed to be stored, filed, and thus later found and excavated. Nowadays, people possess numerous digital mediums for storing memories which can all be accessed nearly instantaneously, including iPhone camera rolls, Instagram profiles, and even Google for memories of general world happenings. We’re free to leave half of our cerebral cortex in the Cloud if we so please.
Suffice it to say, we’re quite comfortable relying on external drives to store our memories - and how could we not be? Most of us have portable camera phones in our possession that can glaciate moments in time with pristine detail and accuracy. The promise of being able to access the happiest times again and again via photo and video is a rather exciting guarantee that we can’t help but accept. It’s a miracle.
I do, wonder, however, how I might otherwise recall past moments if I didn’t have them frozen in my pocket. It’s a hard thing to wonder about because, as someone who was born at the turn of the millennium, I haven’t been alive at a time when there hasn’t been a device around to capture life for me to review later. I might remember fewer specific details and perhaps just relay a general feeling or quality about an event. Perhaps my memories would be less deep but cover more breadth. Of course, I do have organic memories, those that were crystalized in my head in the absence of any external vessel to capture them. Maybe there would be more of them if I didn’t have such vessels - who’s to say?
All I know is that media makes up a good bit of my memories. Both the family-made media of my childhood and the mass-produced DVDs that became worn and scratched up from too much love. While this research from Tamir and Gregory is in reference to self-made media and one’s memory, I feel like many of my memories have also been externalized via movies and TV shows that I enjoyed during a certain time in my life. Like when you listen to your favorite song from high school and are instantly transported to driving to class at 7 AM. My memories come from the moments that only I’ve captured in my head, from the VHS tapes that my parents took of my first Christmas day, and from the summer teen movies that I rewatched excessively on those sickly sweet, lonely summer days.
Watching The Summer I Turned Pretty as a young adult has ignited reflection on the fables I often told myself about how summer is and should be and the realization that I’m at an age where certain media feels referential to work from my childhood. It’s also further cemented the fact that growing up in the twenty-first century involves a sharp collision of self and media, as it’s ripe to consume in virtually any setting. Portable chapter books, DVD players, and phones - everywhere I looked there was something available to tell a story to my impressionable mind as a child. Those stories - the ones told with care and the ones inadvertently communicated and fabricated via social media - became, in some cases, as a part of my childhood memories as the memories of real-life events.
The pang of girlish nostalgia that I get while watching shows like The Summer I Turn Pretty may be a longing for summers passed or more of an allusion to the same feeling I experienced when I watched my first teen summer movie. I suppose that’s what makes stories so powerful - you can live many lives over and over and, as it turns out, build upon those lives. When I look back on my childhood summers, I look back with genuine fondness, even if it’s just a remembrance of those characters that kept a young girl with too much time on her hands company while she waited to get bigger and live those adventurous summers herself. Or at least something approximating them.
Called me out. BUT, I didn't know about the study you mentioned. Fascinating. My summers in a quiet town in northern India were twilight bike rides to graveyards and wild groves, eating mulberries, a nasty game or two of badminton, petty girlish fights, and afternoon library visits to collect my Enid Blytons. And all this after the scorching heatwaves subsided past four PM. Nevertheless, American romcoms based in the summers have left indelible marks on my own memories. Suffusing with my actual memories. Also, Team Con. Ugh.
many of my strongest summer memories come from the movies I watched. I especially remember the summer premieres of Disney Channel’s original movies being huge events for me and my friends. Even well into young adulthood/early 20s my summers were defined by what I watched on tv because that’s nearly all there was to do at the time.