Most of my friends use Gmail and Google’s built-in instant messenger system, Gchat.  By default, Google logs not just every email you’ve ever sent, but every instant message, too.  To wit, only one of my friends has actually gone out of his way to disable this feature (called “going off the record”).

For me, this becomes a question of balancing the potentially frightening implications of recording everything I’ve ever written vs. the fear of losing a chunks of my virtual memory, parts of my real past. After all, thanks to Google, I have a huge keyword-searchable memory backstop.  I’m able to recall nearly any bit of critical information or minutia from the depths of my Gmail archive in a matter of seconds, so long as I can remember just enough peripheral information about an online conversation. For what it’s worth, I haven’t been willing to turn off this auto-logging feature on my own account.  Besides, even if I were to delete these records, presumably they’d still exist on the other person’s account.

I’m curious if and how other people deal with this.  Do you regularly purge your digital memories, or do you (like me) continue archiving everything in your digital life as a matter of practice? Do you ever revisit old conversations? And is that healthy? What do you do with memories or old conversations that you’d rather not remember?  My sense is that the medium makes a big difference; sure, we’re comfortable with managing email, but what about all those instant messages?  What about colorful internet chats with an old lover?

Knowing you can dig back into the past, do you ever fight the urge to look for hints of something you maybe should have noticed, or to say “I told ya so?” How does it make you feel to know that those records still exist, perhaps on someone else’s hard drive and outside of your control, perhaps filed away in perpetuity on a Google server?

I was a big James Joyce fan in college (indeed, there was at least one miserable semester where I thought I was Stephen Dedalus incarnate). Any undergrad Joyce seminar eventually includes some scholarship about the love letters (ahem, very NSFW!) he wrote to his girlfriend (and future wife) Nora Barnacle. I’m going to go out on a limb here and assume that Joyce never expected these private expressions of affection (etc.) wouldn’t stay private. Now these letters are nearly as central to our understanding of Joyce as the spectre of Catholicism that permeates his writing.

Just think: everything you’ve ever written to anyone else is still out there, and it’s keyword-searchable.

YLTLSBCers note: I wasn’t able to post last night because my web-host was down.

So here’s a rough outtake of an experiment I made a few months ago as a possible submission to Third Coast’s “Book Odds” ShortDocs Challenge:

Just Compost It

(You can listen to the piece I ended up submitting here.)

In related news, I (finally) registered to attend the Third Coast Conference this year!

Defense of the statement above to follow.

It was the ambient dusklight, the taste of exhaust hanging too long in the air, wishing I had worn a sweatshirt.

Sifting through a barrel of memories, grasping a handful of matching shards.

Déjà-vu-like but not, echoes “I felt this before, sometime else.”

Tonight: it’s stepping outdoors with Spring bathwater-neutral against your skin,
in reverse.

Last year, the year before?  Which records were I listening to then?