Social media, cloud cannot preserve memories - Ntare Mwine Guma

Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine, the celebrated Ugandan-American playwright, photographer, and Hollywood actor, recently anchored the NBO Film Festival with his deeply personal documentary, Memories of Love Returned. 

While Mwine’s art consistently gravitates homeward to Uganda—a source of inspiration and identity for the first-generation American—his latest work delivers a warning about the future of cultural memory itself. 

The artist is not concerned with the stories being told, but whether the vessels used to contain them will survive.

The Enduring Power of Paper

The genesis of Memories of Love Returned lies in Mwine’s accidental encounter with Kibaate Aloysius Ssalongo, a rural studio photographer who had quietly amassed a vast visual archive over five decades. 

Mwine was moved by the sheer longevity of this physical collection. 

For him, Kibaate’s five decades of work represents the most potent form of preservation.

 He reverently noted in an interview: "The very paper he printed on has survived half a century." 

This tangibility, the ability to touch and pass on a physical memory, stands in sharp contrast to the ephemeral and often unreliable methods of modern archival.

Mwine’s concern is rooted in the digital shift. The modern tendency to store personal histories on social media platforms and in cloud storage, he contends, creates a risk of cultural amnesia. 

“We don’t keep our own materials anymore,” he observes. 

"Now we have everything here. In fifty years, will your phone even be around? No, it’ll be obsolete. And the information will be gone too." 

“I often wonder whether what we’re recording now, our present, will exist fifty years from now. We don’t keep our own materials anymore. We store them on Instagram, on other platforms. And if those disappear, so do we. We have backed ourselves up on the cloud,” he says, with a faint, rueful smile. “And the cloud will evaporate.”

Mwine's concern echoes growing anxieties among archivists and digital rights experts regarding the fragility of modern memory. 

With the advent of social media, the traditional ritual of curating and printing card copy memories (the physical photo album, the written letter) has all but vanished. 

This vanishing tangibility means that vast quantities of digital photographs—often hundreds of thousands per person—are rarely viewed, catalogued, or secured, leading to a silent digital dark age.

Experts warn that as software and hardware formats become obsolete, the documentation of our current lives risks being lost entirely, severing a crucial physical link between future generations and their past.