Once upon a time before the internet, I chronicled my days and nights in a little Garfield-fronted diary that was a gift for some birthday or holiday. It had a lock on it which I could seldom be bothered to use – what’s the fun or point of a diary without the danger of someone else reading it? Back then, I was too young to have anything of any great import in it, and once I did start spilling family secrets (mostly my own) I ended up destroying it in a fit of rage and fear. It didn’t matter – there would be other diaries and journals and projects that would pick up where Garfield left off, chronicling my thoughts and adventures for an audience of one, unintentionally designing a method of dealing with the encroaching madness of the world.
Today, we reveal every last detail and secret about ourselves on social media the instant it all happens, baring and daring our minds and bodies in ways that would have felt flagrantly preposterous a few decades ago, even by the standards of the most exhibitionist-leaning among us. I’m as guilty of this as anyone (and probably a lot more than the average person) and I’ve done it all in an effort to chronicle my mundane life to better understand it. That said, there is much I don’t share, and lines that I will not cross. Having grown up in a blessedly-internet-free world, my childhood and young adulthood did not get captured by any entity other than my own written words and printed photographs. The mistakes of my youth remain mostly in my head, and unavailable for research or deep-dives into the past. That gave me a long stretch of time to make life errors without the lasting evidence of online documentation, and, more importantly, to realize the importance of not putting everything on social media.
I also lived through the first few years of social media growth, and saw how it had the ability to wreak havoc with people. Once you post something online, there’s a good chance that it will be up here forever. The internet is the ultimate paper trail, and it’s almost impossible to eradicate some things at a certain point. My rule-of-thumb on posting things has always been to assume that my mother is going to see and read it (because for the most part she actually does). Luckily, or unluckily for some, I’ve always been shockingly open with my Mom, so I tend to share things that others wouldn’t, but again, anything I post is something I would stand behind for a lifetime to come.
Maybe I’m getting more prudish in my older years, or maybe this is just the accrual of some missing sense, but when I look at what people are posting these days, I wonder if they’re thinking of the mother test. I also wonder what they will do if one day they have children who have the basic ability to search and find the electronic fingerprints left by their parents. Will they be able to explain what they wrote as an immature 18-year-old on Instagram? If not, I hope they have the wisdom not to post it. The internet is now and forever, and offers little space for regret.
Having said all that, follow me on Instagram!
