My digital self is disappearing. Time to decide what I’ll leave behind
When I was 19, I visited the Melbourne Arts Center for an exhibition that gave an insight into the work and creative process of songwriter Nick Cave. His handwritten lyrics were displayed in notebooks and diaries, but now, 16 years later, all I remember was a gap from when Cave started writing on the computer. Suddenly all the scribbled sketches—the half-attempts and false starts that seemed like failures until they resulted in a breakthrough—were gone. Why keep the less refined original when a sloppy first draft could be overridden by the tidy final version?
I’ve been thinking about the process of self-archiving ever since I read Ian McEwan’s last novel. What Can We Know?. In the most reductive terms, it is about a scientist’s search for a poem and the remnants of a lost cultural era. Tom lives in 2119 and is obsessed with a particular dinner party held in 2014 at the home of a fictional poet in the Cotswolds. Thanks to the time he spent poring over various archives and thousands of internet search results, Tom knows who was at dinner, what they were discussing, what they were cooking, and who was yelling at whom.
Credit: Robin Cowcher
“I want to shout through a hole in the ceiling of time and advise the people of a hundred years ago: If you want your secrets to be kept, whisper them into the ear of your favorite, most trusted friend. Don’t rely on the keyboard and the screen,” McEwan writes as Tom. “If you do this, we will know everything.”
The book is about many things, including what we might know about one of those he left behind for us to find. Poets, writers and artists do business. They also write letters, keep diaries, and share secrets via email. A character starts writing his diary thinking about future academics; It’s as if he’s saying: If you’re going to create a neat little narrative of my life, I’ll have a say in how you describe me.
I was terrible at keeping a diary for this very reason: growing up reading Anne Frank, Kurt Cobain, and Sylvia Plath, at a very impressionable age, planted the seed that diary writing was an act of performance; If you’re going to write one, it has to be worth reading by a stranger someday.
When I started writing for an audience, the internet came with a built-in system; but I quickly learned to adapt to change and be OK with my contributions disappearing into a digital void. My teenage years were chronicled on a series of now-defunct websites: I blogged on MSN Space, MySpace, and Tumblr. I uploaded thousands of photos from university parties and music festivals to Facebook, which I haven’t used actively for years. Last year, after 16 years on Twitter, I deleted my account and everything I shared there.
‘After 20 years of chronicling my life on the internet, I looked around and found a series of broken links and 404 error pages.’
My longest trip abroad was in 2016, when I used Snapchat, so most of my holiday photos are somewhere deep in an app I haven’t used in almost a decade. Many of my early articles were published on websites that shut down within a few years.
After 20 years of chronicling my life online, I looked around and found a number of broken links and 404 error pages. There’s very little left that I could revisit even if I wanted to. It makes a very convincing case for the practice of creating a kind of archive.
