This Started As A Status

I read an article* the other day about a gal who wanted to purge her entire Facebook timeline history. Her main theory was that the very nature of social media is that most of our posts become irrelevant after a certain amount of time.  I don't disagree with her, but I won't be combing through a five year timeline in order to stay "relevant".  After all, another perspective is that things such as are Facebook are our generation’s chronicle of our lives, however mundane they may look time from time, they are no less important or relevant later on.  I think that is why one should try to utilize some analysis before deciding what is worth (to you) “sharing” in the first place; because in some way or another it becomes a permanent part of that chronicle.

This article did however reignite a certain desire I have from time to time to digitally purge.  Online photo albums in particular spark a love-hate relationship within me.  While I certainly want to have a way to easily look back at milestones, I don’t necessarily want to relive painful milestones, see familiar faces that are now distant/dead relationships, or just realize how many mundane selfies I felt necessary to share with my digital community.  If I do edit or delete these digital memories, am I exercising the right to preserve memories only of my choosing, or am I doing what no generation before me has had the particular privilege of doing: deleting and editing undesirable perspectives of themselves?

What about this very blog, last updated months ago and started years ago.  By posting in it, I’m giving both you and myself an accessible avenue to cull over pages of thoughts, some of which I might decide I wish I hadn’t published to cyberspace (because obviously you have nothing better to do than cull over blog entries dating back almost eight years. :-) ).  If I choose to delete some of said entries, am I being selfishly selective, or prudent? After all, isn’t self-respect some of the most important respect there is?

Looking over (and even deleting) some items today has led me to think that sometimes I don’t necessarily need to  “delete” but rather to refocus.  And that’s not just with digital items, but with the intangible, the mental, and the emotional.   While eternally valuable, as is anything that shapes us, are certain memories and personal monuments necessarily relevant or profitable?

So what do YOU think?  Would you spend hours like the writer I referenced proposed: editing, pruning, and altogether deleting your online history in order to feel "cleansed"? Or has it all been out there from day one and will continue to be unashamedly so?  And is all this talk of editing, deleting, and sharing really a metaphor for our cluttered mental and emotional lives?

~DB

*"I Decided To Delete All My Facebook Activity" via Slate by Jennifer Golbeck