On archives
My mother misses discovering new books all on her own, without reading anything about them or their authors in advance. When she was growing up, she chose books off the shelves at the Marietta library based solely on the titles on their spines. There were no pictures on the covers or blurbs on the back or “about the author” pages. She read Of Human Bondage in the fifth grade because she didn’t know what the word ‘bondage’ meant and by the end of the first chapter she was so involved that Maugham became one of “her authors” and she read all his other books too. She started reading Faulkner in the eighth grade because she liked the sound of Sanctuary, and it wasn’t until she was at college and started asking other people if they’d ever read anything by this guy named William Faulkner that she discovered that he was a famous, “great” writer.
. . .
I am still thinking about my habit of thinking that I need to erase or hide the mess of my past in order to start fresh. This has many negative consequences, including the fact that my files are such a disorganized mess. Every time I have an urge to clear off my desktop, I just toss all my old files into a folder labelled “old stuff” and hide it all somewhere, so I can get them out of the way and start my new, organized life with a fresh set of empty folders. After decades of this, it’s terribly difficult to find anything I’m looking for. I have so many different files labelled “writing” or “photographs” or “web” from so many different years, all nested inside each other in a cryptic structure. And my constantly changing web spaces and email addresses and so forth in order to reinvent myself on a blank canvas when I was a teenager also directly lead to my losing vast amounts of data when my abandoned email accounts and Geocities/Tripod accounts and LiveJournals were deleted and purged without having been backed up.
I have the same habit of withdrawing much too completely from “failed” relationships in order that I can “move on,” which I think is related to some of the difficulty I have in remembering the way things were. I throw away much more than is necessary.
One consequence of having my archives organized so opaquely is that when I do start digging, I often discover things I haven’t seen in years. I went on a mining expedition through my hard disk last night and found so many files from 1998 and 1999 that I didn’t realize I still had. All the meticulously hand-coded versions of my first domain, Sarasvati.org, from the days when I wanted to be a web designer. Journal entries that never made it into any content management system later on. Here’s an except from one I wrote when I was fifteen, that clears up the mystery of one of my first online flirtations somewhat:
“‘…no idea if you’re a guy or a gal, hopefully the latter cuz I could love you, and don’t feel like struggling with my sexuality these days, too damn old and busy, heh.”
This quote is from the first email R ever sent me. That was almost a year ago. The email he and I exchanged (in between the day he discovered that loving me could likely land him in prison and the day he ran off to Vegas and married an old friend of his) could easily fill a book. Or two. I’m still planning on publishing (and making a fortune off of) his half, when he dies. He’s quite well worded and interesting. We certainly don’t exchange five or six emails a day anymore, but we still communicate every now and then…”
I don’t have any of that old email anymore, so I am out of luck making my fortune from it. R was more than twice my age, so perhaps he had better back-up habits in 1997. It might be worth trying to contact him (and any number of other people I had intense email-based relationships with before 2003, when I registered my current domain) to see if he still has our correspondence saved on an ancient disk or server somewhere. Though my assumption that the public at large of the future would have an interest in these records was incredibly naive, my self of the future certainly does.
All this is tied into my thinking about making my old journal archives public again, which I am feeling more and more inclined to do (actually my previous wordpress site, with entries back to 1999, is already available, I just haven’t merged it with the present one).
I have several girlfriends I’ve kept in touch with since our very earliest days of writing on the web, in our teens. Some of them no longer have websites at all. But, of those who are still posting journal/blog entries and art/photography on the web, very few of them still have their material from the old days online. They talk of being embarrassed by their early work (even though the rest of the world still seems to love it, me included!) and of no longer feeling comfortable sharing such personal details of their lives with strangers, opting to stick with more focused and less risky material in blogs. Maybe this collective move away from the confessional is a consequence of getting older and less self-involved and more integrated with the world at large. Maybe it’s because now our parents and extended families and employers and students and potential new friends “IRL” and (most especially) the people that we’ve written about are all online, and we want to protect them and ourselves from the consequences of too much information and the “wrong impression.” Those are certainly key reasons I’ve had for taking down old online journals and photos or redacting and password-protecting things. But, for me at least, it’s also related to this (mistaken) idea that who I am now is somehow being defined or constrained by what information from my past is available to others. I want to be in control of all the information out there pertaining to myself (which is, of course, impossible), and I have a deep-seated fear that if everyone knew all my secrets, disaster would fall and I would be adandoned by the people whose love, affection, and respect I desire.
On one level, all of this obsession with my personal archives, much like my thinking (even jokingly) at fifteen that someday I could publish my personal emails as a book and make money from it, is silly, because, of course, no one, except possibly me, has much interest in sifting through all the ephemera of my past and making all sorts of judgments about the present me based on it, and even I (even unemployed!) do not have the time for that. There is too much new work still to be done, too many new stories I still need to write, too much art I still need to make. But I do believe that it is important to continue to examine these strange habits I have in thinking of my past (ranging from feeling oppressed/doomed by my mistakes to thinking that all my “best days” are behind me), because I can’t let go of them if I can’t see them.
(The truth is: in the kingdom of heaven, everything is included.)
I’ve been thinking a lot about the archive and digitization since it is a large portion of my studies, and in turn, thinking about my own “life” that I have led online since 1997. I am tempted to create an archive of all that I have from then until now, because so much of it I feel so detached from. However, I too am anxious that I will somehow be judged and characterized by my output as a teenager. I shouldn’t be anxious though. I want to embrace it and on a more academic note, I have conversed with several professors who think that this type of archiving work is really fascinating, especially since so much what was created online in the 90′s is so fragmented through the Internet Archive.
I want to write about people I know in real life. I want them to read my blog. I want to be open. Completely open. It’s so pretty to think so.
I am taking a course on Digital Methods this summer, and here is our tools page
http://tools.digitalmethods.net >> some of this might be useful to you for searching the web in different ways…
Oh wow, this is very cool, Magda. Thanks for the link. I’ve used the WayBack Machine (most of my oldest stuff is lost or very fragmented as you note) but most of these tools are new to me.
Complete openness is beautiful but also scary. I hope to take the leap eventually.
I just wanted to say that yesterday I was talking about your recent entries to my boyfriend. It was interesting, talking about it in real life, because I often keep the fact that I even read personal blogs – especially of girls I used to read when I was younger – private. But we were watching The Beaches of Agnes (have you seen it? Amazing autobiographical documentary whimsically meditating on so much of this stuff) and it seemed appropriate. And it wasn’t a big deal – it was the same as if I said, “I was reading in Harpers..” (Maybe to you! People are talking about you, “a writer and a neuroscientist”
!)
I was one of the girls writing promiscuous confessions online at sixteen, and now I don’t anymore (or sort of don’t), because I still haven’t been able to figure out a way to mesh the two worlds in a way that’s comfortable. I made some art about it, curating old journals and re-interpreting things and questioning the meanings. But I think what’s going on is that it’s not two worlds for most people, it’s one. I talk about something I read on someone’s facebook when I see them at a party, as if continuing the conversation. The realities have converged, changing the rules for both spaces as we knew them. So that means you don’t need to wait to be published, because you already are, for real!
I’ve always thought of writing as a process of constructing yourself. It’s a work that is never finished – you are always the editor, always re-writing, always in process. Maybe it’s okay that your files aren’t organized, because they are notes. Maybe they contain interesting patterns that aren’t the ones you’re searching for. Meaning is so plastic. And text is hyper. We were writing online to want to be women of letters, to write Important Things, but because we belonged to our time, we were first writing hypertext. And we still are. Maybe the very overwhelming categorization of messy content management systems is the solution to your conflict with narrative memory. Maybe. What do I know? All I know is I like your words, in their many arrangements.
Oh also, because our reality is intertextual and hyper, thinking about this made me think of some of Jack Kerouac’s advice for writing. From his belief and technique for modern prose, 17-25:
17. Write in recollection and amazement of yourself
18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
19. Accept loss forever
20. Believe in the holy contour of life
21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
22. Dont think of words when you stop but to see picture better
23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr monrning
24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
http://www.poetspath.com/transmissions/messages/kerouac.html
Natalia, I know exactly what you mean when you talk about the two worlds becoming one. I definitely perceived my online life and my “real” life as separate worlds when I was younger, though I did manage to meet some of my closest internet friends in person back then. (One of the buried treasures I unearthed yesterday was a website one of my oldest friends, Jennifer Rimm, and I made together, giving our separate accounts of the first time we met in person, when we were 15 and 16, after having been friends online for a year or more. In the thirteen years since then, we’ve lived together in two different states, and have also had long periods in which we lived far apart and only communicated via Internet except for short visits).
Of course as more people have come online, and especially now that all my original “online friends” and my family and coworkers and the people I went to school with are all my friends on Facebook, these two worlds have merged more and more. And that has required an adjustment (and caused discomfort) for me that people who are just a few years younger can’t always relate to, because they never experienced the web as a separate/private space where most of the people they interacted with in their day-to-day lives had never been.
I haven’t seen The Beaches of Agnes, but I am a fan of Agnes Varda, and I named one of my old powerbooks “Varda” in her honor.
I’m especially fond of Kerouac’s points 19 and 24.
I think I liked designing for myself more than I liked writing about myself. Looking back on the network that we all seemed to be a part of, I’m especially proud of the pre-LJ pre-database-driven html identities we fashioned for ourselves at such a young age. I am uncomfortable thinking back on those years as I never totally occupied the discursive space that I claimed for myself in the hopes that I would just grow into her – the content never emerged to follow the identity. I think that’s why I entirely withdrew from online writing around 2001 – I preferred observing to documentation.
Also, I suppose it is relevant that the self I put forth on the internet during those years was heavily shaped by a very deep but nonsexual long-term relationship with a man twice my age. He never saw what I put online, but to him I wanted to be nothing but the photographer and Courier-love-letter-to-darkness-writing self I deployed therein.
I will say this networked landscape was invaluable for everything it taught me about gender identity and desire. It would be many years before I would have a name for what I really came to understand and love about myself during that time, but the internet relationships (even the one-way trajectories of admiration) that I cultivated through our sites were instrumental in me beginning to see myself as a queer woman.
These days I still do a small amount of personal writing at the scale of intimacy that I reached in those days – hidden in a folder deep in my Documents, in ten-page text-and-images PDFs, to a very dear woman in my life. Audience of one. Similar issues are raised. I like it this way.
everything I wrote is horribly embarrassing, and I’m glad it’s all kept friends only or private thanks to livejournal. there are a few choice pieces online, still, “hidden” away in archives on my domain. sometimes I show them off to friends when we want to remember (and laugh a little bit) and get a blast from the past. usually I just keep it to myself so I have something to look at when I feel nostalgic.
I do enjoy going back thru my archives and looking at the old siren.org message boards I ran for a while back in ’99 and 2000. I still have those saved on my computer.
I probably won’t ever delete my Livejournal as I do have a permanent account, and there’s too much there I still want to review and save.
that period of time was such an interesting time in my life. it’s fascinating how the internet had such a huge part in shaping who I became. now though…. I feel very disconnected from who I was then. my mom even reads my (now public) blog these days, and I would never, ever, ever write there the way I did back then on all of my anonymous websites. in fact, I haven’t written anything “worthwhile” in a very long time, but I can remember days at age 16 when I’d rattle off three poems a day, and they weren’t half bad, either. I sincerely miss that more than I could ever describe in this little text box.
I don’t think anyone can understand what it was like to be an early “blogger” back then unless you were actually a part of the scene. no one I try to explain it to ever seems to understand.
[...] of the “history of the web” having really started in earnest only fifteen years ago; Katharine is writing about her own struggles with keeping, rather than trying to efface, earlier identities; but we talk about the Internet as of ten or [...]
I like the archive as a tool for forgetting (a monument to someone now gone). Its almost like I keep writing to get it out of my head, for clarity. The past scares me a lot, what I said, what i was capable of.
I find I am less open and ponderous than I once was. it is due mostly to the shrinking of my personal sphere, while the opportunities for expression widen. I cannot make the two fit in the same way anymore, small, hidden, personal.
well. i’ve been through so much with all of this. i’ve been there and back again. and back again. and… i think the internet is a very different place than it was when i started (in 1995) ha. of course, but it was so easy to be “honest” in the beginning. there was a definite feeling of the net being that ‘other place’ you could leave the bits of yourself that had no place in day to day reality.
i do miss coding every page by hand. and i have those same disorganised archives and intent to ‘put it back online’ but every time i try i feel like something is missing, and what is missing is the _context_. and i face the fct that i’m never going to get that back again.
I don’t know if you every saw the project me and michael did called skinonskinonskin? it is a series of very personal love letters in the form of html pages, animations, music. we never took it offline, have moved it from place to place and it is basically a document of us falling in love in 1999. it is now and has always been locked behind a password but i will send you a key if you want to look behind the door. i mention it because i don’t know if outside of the context of 1999 if such a thing has relevance to people living in 2010 who weren’t there.
maybe it is the nature of this new medium, the network that things, in their own way deteriorate and die. that Memories Were Meant To Fade. and they do, either by technology moving on, migration to new servers, or lost data and poor archiving. Over the years I have had to let go of some wonderful projects that I’ve poured my soul into, simply because the data decayed. And THATS OKAY. maybe the internet has something to teach us about letting go. not WANTING things to last forever. being in this moment, right here, right now. and we don’t need those archives. but they are there for us to be archeologists of our own past. if thats what we need.
I guess, while I can be as sentimental about my data as I can about childhood photos of me and my sisters. and while I love the many people I only know online through the years. this place isn’t so different from the ‘real world’ after all.
or is it?
sigh.
sorry, i’m rambling.
Auriea, I was a witness to your love story, to the (epic!!) coming together of entropy8 and Zuper! back in the days of hell.com and I was absolutely fascinated and amazed. The idea that I would ever actually meet you and Michael would have totally floored my 15 year old self.
What you did was a beautiful, beautiful thing, and it’s very difficult to imagine it happening now. Though a lot of the things you were making (like skinonskinonskin) were too advanced for my sluggish connection/machine back then. I remember sitting and waiting and waiting there on my bed in Georgia for your pages to load, with such anticipation. I would love a password to get back in.
These comments are amazing and so fruitful.
I remember there was a community of “oldskoolers” on LJ that started many years ago where people tried to search out those they used to communicate/share links/webrings with, but like was touched on above the context was missing and there is only so far such a sentimental thread can last, in my opinion.
However, it is so fascinating how much history we were making and what it means for our online communication now and also how we view how others communicate that got online post-2000 or so. I mean, like we all mentioned, it was so much easier to be online as a teenage girl, even if we were all online because we suffered and needed an outlet to discuss and make sense of our “real lives” (I’m generalizing here, but all the people I made friends with discusses this, which is why they came online…) I mean easier, because we were able to have a voice, a voice that didn’t have the filter that we have now, now that the real world and online world has coalesced into one. I cannot imagine going through my teenagehood without the support of the online community or being able to express myself through my website. Creating my identity.
Is there any work done on the history of this, the history of us? Maybe we should do a documentary!
Also, think it’s totally crazy that Jordan and I used to be roommates. That happened through another mutual friend after we lost touch being ‘online friends.’
Karen, who commented above, is responsible for the “oldskoolers” community you’re referring to, Magda. Our friend Alyssa started to work on a documentary a while back, and interviewed Helena. Trying to convince her to take to back up.
[...] the reaches of the small, Southern town I grew up in far, far, FAR outweighed the negatives. But, as I have mentioned before, the Internet was a very different world in those days than in 2006, when Richard Yates is set. It [...]
Great topic and discussion. This is the first and only post I’ve ever read by this author, Katharine is it? All I know about Katharine at this post, is that her and I share in common every single “thing” she expressed in this post. Everything. Every thought and detail including a massive, randomly and partially redundant, archive of “old_stuff, old_desktop, old_mydocuments, etc.” folders, – “…all nested inside each other in a cryptic structure.”
Anyway,
This discussion about trying to reconcile our online lives with our “real” lives, is one I haven’t come across until now. This issue is one that only a small group of people, who were just the right age range with access, have experienced and can relate to. This is a situation so unique, that it has never come about in all of history, and never will reoccur in the future: there are no solutions available and no need for any in the future. I’m not even sure a documentary would be appreciated – given that nobody, other than “us,” will ever relate to our predicament. Never-the-less, the topic must be explored and solutions must be found – because, today’s web will only accommodate one’s “real life,” or at least a “singular” life.
I’ve been online since day one. Like us all, I have gone through different stages – and recorded them all online in some way or another. I’ve also had a few careers (professional artist/painter – - site owner – - application developer). This makes it all the more complicated: as an artist, there were no consequences for intimate or “experimental” expression; the more raw honest and daring personal the better. For the most part, my career now requires interaction with professionals, background-checks, authorizations, references, resumes – the normal things that come with doing professional contract work, or taking 9-5 developer positions with corporations or “agencies.” I haven’t found a way to merge the two lives. I too have gone back and forth and back…
I really appreciated the opportunity to be inventive and experimental via my “online” life; I assumed that this opportunity was a permanent new aspect to life – and would only be understood more and more by society and acquaintances. Instead, the game has changed so much that most friends and acquaintance my own age even, can’t relate, because they weren’t heavily online until everybody else “booked” their way on.
I am thinking that I’ll have to erase, as much as possible, the entire past me in order to move forward and fully realize success and legitimacy in my profession and career. Even aside from work, I’m still single, and I often wonder if ever finding a wife and having a family will require the removal of all parts of my creating and history that is hard to understand.
I worry so much about being miss-judged, or judged poorly, for past content people might dig up. And I don’t want to erase my past; I don’t want to destroy all the creations; I don’t feel that I am bad or psychotic for anything that I’ve expressed and would prefer to keep it all around; unfortunately, I know some will get a bad impression of me; the two lives have already collided a few times lately – with negative effects – within the context of work and private relationships. I know such collisions will happen more and more – with the “facebook” reality now in full swing – and as my professional footprint continues to expand.
I guess I will scrub the past and start over from blank. If I ever make enough money to do so, I will go back to just being an artist and expressing whatever I wish – how I wish.