Remembrance Day is about looking back. It’s about a collective memory of war, sacrifice and reflection. But today, conflict isn’t confined to the past; it streams live to our phones 24/7.
Whether it’s in Ukraine, Gaza or Sudan, we have become direct witnesses — and sometimes unwilling participants — in an endless information battlefield shaped by echo chambers and algorithms. Some experts say constant exposure to war, violence and diverging “truths” may reshape how we remember it.
“In previous generations, the information we got tended to be pretty consistent,” said Steve Joordens, a psychology professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough who studies how attention and memory work in the digital age.
“Some people might know more or fewer details, but generally we were all exposed to the same stories about events like wars, and we had time to think about them and reflect deeply.”
Joordens says Remembrance Day ceremonies of the past helped build a collective memory, but that collective memory is now under threat. Now, he says, personalized news feeds expose each person to a different set of facts.
Stress and ‘shallow memory’
Dr. Katy Kamkar, a clinical psychologist at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, sees a spread of “digital war fatigue” — a mix of learned helplessness, desensitization and compassion burnout.
“People’s emotional systems aren’t designed to process trauma on an endless loop,” she says. “Everything happens at once — disasters, personal loss, all side by side. There’s no time or space to recover emotionally.”
That emotional overload, Kamkar said, mirrors what other researchers have found physiologically; our brains and bodies start reacting to war as if we’re living inside it.
Joordens says some of us reach a state of empathy overload: a natural emotional shutdown that follows repeated exposure to horrific stories.
This leads to what Joordens calls “a shallow memory,” rooted in brain physiology.
Endless scrolling now delivers both real horror and manufactured outrage which shaping how we see, feel and remember. (igorstevanovic/Shutterstock)
Joordens said that constant exposure to distressing images floods the body with stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline.
Over time that kind of physiological stress affects our immune system, but it also affects our hippocampus — the part of the brain that consolidates experiences into long-term memory. When the brain is overstressed, Joordens said “we basically become a form of amnesiac,” unable to properly lay down new deep memories.
Dr. Alison Holman, professor of psychology and nursing at UC Irvine, worries that the endless cycle may be changing our core assumptions about the world, that people are basically good, and the world is safe. “I worry that people who get overexposed start losing faith in humanity,” she said.
‘It just breeds cynicism’
That result may be partly by design, some experts say. With AI accelerating, truth and lies now appear side by side on our phones, creating distrust and dividing people’s sense of reality.
“Psychology or morale has always been a critical part of warfare,” said former Canadian Armed Forces officer Jay Janzen, now director of strategic communications for NATO’s military headquarters. “What’s changed today is the scale and speed at which you can target the morale and cohesion of armies and their societies.”
He says that modern adversaries systematically target public trust and resilience, flooding societies with both lies and emotional overload. “It’s a wicked problem,” he adds, “because the thing we value most — free expression — is being weaponized against us.”
Marcus Kolga, founder of DisinfoWatch. (Benjamin Lopez Steven/CBC)
Marcus Kolga, a foreign policy analyst specializing in disinformation and founder of DisinfoWatch.org, says the modern information war isn’t new, what’s changed is how fast it enters into people’s daily lives.
“The foundation of a normally functioning society is basic information — trust and belief in a basic set of facts about what’s happening every day,” Kolga said. “The way we interpret those facts may differ, and that’s fine. But those basic building blocks of information are crumbling. It just breeds cynicism.”
He warns that this is making people tune out. When everyone lives in a different version of reality, he says, “how can we possibly have a shared memory of anything?”
Our visceral reactions can be engineered for engagement and, in some cases, the spread of disinformation. Kolga says this can deliberately erode trust in democratic societies, in the media and in one another. Social media giants, he adds, also share the blame, driven by profit and the attention spiral that fuels it.
He says Canada should follow Europe’s lead and adopt stronger regulations on transparency to hold platforms accountable. In the meantime, Joordens, Kamkar and Holman say individuals can reclaim some control by setting limits on exposure, seeking context over clicks and grounding empathy in real connection.
Janzen argues that while regulation and deterrence are part of the solution, lasting resilience requires long-term civic education and social trust. “You can’t go from vulnerable to resilient overnight.”
Because when facts splinter and empathy burns out, remembrance itself risks becoming another casualty of the attention war.
