I started this blog as a way of documenting past events online and how they have helped me grow as a person. I am the first generation who grew up with the internet evolving at the same time, never will it be the same. Younger generations will be just used to the internet being there, older will remember pre-internet, the good old days of books and Encarta, university without facebook photo tagging and no iphone to answer all your queries. I am part of an age group that actually became young adults, teens to tweens, as the internet took hold of the world and became a part of life; I think for many of us it had a profound effect in some of our most influential years.
I’m only 4/5 days into this project and I’m finding it both enlightening and hard. As I go to sleep every night my head is filled with ideas for tomorrow blog, sometimes filling in gaps I previously forgot. As I warm up under the duvet in my very cold room, I am torn as to whether to leap out of bed and grab a pen to write it all down or even switch the computer on and just blog again, but the necessity to remain nice and toasty has so far stopped me. I am surprised how much this is really re-awakening my mind and making me search the vaults of memories for all those unique moments that have defined me. It keeps me up for a good half an hour; tonight I shall take the pen and paper with me so I stop tormenting myself!
On the most part it’s been a lovely reminder and often during or after (as a treat for completion) I fire up the removable hard drive and search for some remnant of that time, an email, photo, video or even logged back into long un-active accounts just for the reminiscing moments. With computers ever growing memory capacity and the internet storing information for a possibly infinite length of time on massive servers, we are now able to return to memories from many years ago. There is no need to de-clutter one’s life so much, you just move on and leave traces behind and it is surprising how many of them remain in one way or another!
In most of my trawling of old memories it’s been a positive experience, those relationships and experiences have run their course and I am happy with the outcomes. Occasionally I do ponder about re-establishing connections, but I’ve refrained in the cases of the blogs so far. (EDIT: - Until today, I just put the wheels in motion in the case of the Knight – I’ll inform you how that goes ?!).
Five years is a long time, I was a very idealistic teen and I know that the memories are probably best left as that. Actually I’m pretty content with my story so far on this blog, and so I am happy to let it lie. BUT I have found myself, as I consider future chapters and how to tackle the more difficult parts of my time online struggling to resist the urge to reconnect with people I had not so easy journeys with. There are a few chapters which never really concluded or if they did, I have regrets of how it happened. Until yesterday I’d kept a strong mind, but then I slipped and I actually slipped into the messiest one of all... When I share the details, you’ll realise why this was such a BAD idea but it will take me time to put it all down on here...
I’m ashamed I did it; I guess I just needed to know a few things to get closure. But instead of just asking all the questions and leaving it at that, I got myself embroiled and let them walk straight back in like they owned the place. Boy I feel stupid! I thought I was strong enough to not let it get to me...
I’m happy now in life, real life, that is why I started writing this but all this reminiscing has lead me to open a big can of carnivorous worms!
This is a really interesting concept. A friend of mine told me recently that his cousin had made her baby a facebook page as a present for when she's older, so this is a kid who will grow up on a social networking site.
ReplyDeleteI often think our computers are becoming more and more like our brains too- filled with files and files of memories. Hmmm, it's got me thinking. Nice post.