The Screenshot Graveyard

Saving everything and returning to almost nothing 

By: Julia Gendin

Graphic by Petra De Meo

Consider a doctor’s instructions, a paragraph from an article, a text message that made you feel better, a dress you might buy from Aritzia, a restaurant a friend recommended. 

Most of us have one or all of the above examples in our camera rolls. Together, they make up thousands of tiny digital scraps that were important enough to save and not important enough to ever look at again. We tell ourselves we are helping our future selves. 

New research from Binghamton University suggests that taking a photograph or screenshot could actually impair our memory of what we just captured. Researchers also considered cognitive offloading, the idea that once information has been stored somewhere else, we may devote fewer mental resources to remembering it ourselves.

Unfortunately, a screenshot isn't necessarily a second copy of a memory. Sometimes, it may be a substitute for one.

Screenshot 1: “Take with food”

Imagine a message from a doctor:

Take this medication with food. Call if symptoms continue.

You screenshot it immediately. Something is reassuring about seeing the little thumbnail appear in your camera roll. You don't have to keep repeating it to yourself. You can move on. In one sense, that is exactly what cognitive offloading is designed to do.

Our working memory has limited capacity. We cannot consciously juggle every instruction, appointment, number, thought and worry that crosses our minds. We deal with hundreds, if not thousands, of these every day, and it is not surprising that it can feel quite overwhelming.

Putting something into a phone can therefore feel like putting down a heavy bag. However, when we screenshot the doctor's instructions, we are essentially telling our brains: You don't need to remember this. The phone has it.

Screenshot 2: “Only two left”

It was a black dress: $78, only two left, and never purchased.

This is a different kind of digital clutter: things we haven't decided about. Our phones make postponement incredibly easy. Instead of buying the dress or deciding we don't want it, we can preserve the possibility indefinitely. The same thing can happen with recipes, apartments, vacation spots, books, workouts, restaurants, and articles.

That can matter for our mental well-being because mental clutter can often be about the number of things our minds feel responsible for keeping track of. When we are stressed, working memory can be particularly vulnerable to depletion, making cognitive load an important consideration in health and behavior-change settings.

Screenshot 3: “Is this normal?”

Take your search history. These searches may look familiar:

Can stress cause tingling?

Is it normal if my stomach hurts when I’m upset?

When should I worry if a headache does not go away?

So, you take a screenshot. Here, saving information can feel almost like self-soothing. For a moment, the uncertainty feels contained. But the screenshot doesn't actually resolve the uncertainty. It preserves the question alongside the answer. There is a difference between using technology to support memory and using technology to avoid the discomfort of not knowing.

So, what should we do with our screenshots?

We should not stop taking them or delete our entire camera roll. The research does not suggest that every photograph or screenshot is harmful. The Binghamton researchers specifically noted that photographs could support long-term retention when people actively reviewed them as cues for elaborative memory retrieval. The problem comes when we capture endlessly and never return.

The better approach is to make the screenshot the beginning of a process rather than the end of one. If something genuinely matters, give it a second step. If a screenshot represents a decision, make the decision. If it represents a worry, address the worry. And if it no longer matters, let it disappear.