.@davecormier and you’re making me cry, darn it, with this post [link to post]

– Posted using Chat Catcher

I have struggled these past few months with some of the questions you raise here about our digital identities, so much so, in fact, that I pop onto Twitter from time to time, and post photos to Flickr (almost never of my family), but no longer blog. I want to live intensely in my senses in my head and heart without cluttering up the air with so much stuff, so much ephemera.

I have lost dear ones. I never Google them. I choose to remember them through our shared experiences, through the fragments of artifacts they have left, until for whatever reason, they slip away. That seems right to me. The rhythms of the generations, the slim echoes of family traits and shards of stories of who they were finally fading into the earth. How strange to have everything here, recorded, to WATCH.

As a child (yes, I suppose I was strange) I collected old photographs of people and spectacles and vintage clothes as bits of people’s lives, but lives unknown to me. I loved imagining their stories without being yoked to fact. I have a huge box of photos from my mother’s family–I have no idea who half those people are. But that’s kind of wonderful in my book. I like the thought of the thread of identity weaving itself through time, but then it is released, or at least it fades or is loosened from the tethers of circumstance.

On the other hand, the post itself raises amazing questions and makes me want to think more critically of the time we spend sharing things online. What all this means is so radically different than it did merely ten years ago — I am now able to preserve my words like “real” authors … perhaps they’ll be read by my children someday, perhaps not. Either way, the footsteps we leave in the snow are, at some level, being preserved like never before. I guess I’ve spent most of my time thinking about how all of our artifacts add up to something, when I shouldn’t really worry about that. One phrase, one tweet, one picture, or one movie may hold the hidden secret for someone looking for answers about my life someday — and I’ve become my own archivist and curator. Somehow all of our sharing and connecting online just got more important to me.

Again, thanks for a wonderfully insightful and touching post.

I don’t remember my brother at all. I’ve realized any memories I have of him are just shadows of photographs displayed in darkened corners. Stories retold by my parents years later.

I wonder how things might be, had he left more of a trace. If he’d written, or drawn, or photographed, or anything that produced artifacts that could then help me to feel what he was. (sure, he was only 10, but my 6 year old has had several orders of magnitude more media recording his life than my brother ever did)

He’s gone. I’ll never really know anything about him.

My father in law died last christmas. He had a few scattered photographs of his childhood and early years, but that’s about it. Much of his history went to the grave with him.

When I die, my son (and his, etc…) will know something about me. They’ll know something about my son’s childhood. They’ll know from several perspectives, from documentary and real life snapshots of who we were. Who we are. What will this mean to them, in the decades to come? I don’t know. But I’d rather have a few gigabytes of stuff to sift through, than struggling to remember anything of a brother now lost forever.

Thanks for this, it is a powerful meditation on our moment that moves well beyond the very focused questions and issues we often get trapped within.