A couple of weeks ago I woke up with a strong impulse to delete all my tweets, so I did. 10 years of impulsive thoughts, random musings, reactions to things that may or may not have had anything to do with me, and forays into hashtags severed of context – all gone with the click of a button. It’s not that there was anything incriminating there (that I can think of) – but as I scrolled through my feed as a do you really want to do this procedure, it felt like going through a photo album of bad haircuts. It wasn’t so much of a “I wish I hadn’t said that” vibe but more like a “let’s not let that be a quote of mine that’s available for everyone to access forever.” Most of it was cringey jokes, spurts of pretentiousness, and self-promotion attached to memories of disappointment when my grand announcements landed like a hotdog tossed down a hallway.
This isn’t the first time I’ve done a digital purge. About a year ago I deleted my facebook profile, and way back in 2009 I went through the same motions of deleting several years of my early tweets and made a commitment to only post things on the internet that were “truly useful to the greater public” 🙄
All of those decisions have generally been pluses, and in many cases have been more satisfying than anything that I’ve ever impulsively posted. But still, there are digital footprints that are lost forever which I wish still remain. My Asian Avenue profile from the 90’s, mostly for nostalgic purposes. My blogs from the early 2000’s which probably still do exist somewhere, but are lost in broken code. iLL-Literacy Youtube videos which I also deleted during The Great Purge of 2009 because they weren’t as “professional” as how I wanted us to present ourselves – videos which are ironically more valuable to me now than anything we put out with a press release. It seems that my urges to delete everything are no less compulsive than whatever it was that drove me to put that out there in the first place. Maybe one day I’ll scroll through all of these posts and also decide to wipe them off the web with the click of a wand. These days, I’m questioning why the temporary, the vapid, the ephemeral have a bad wrap. Is there actually any single moment that you’d truly want to “live in?”