Posterity 2.0… 2?

I’m re-posting a blog entry from not long ago, as it reveals what is still fluttering around in my mind concerning technology & me. I do so with both a pit in my stomach and a half-smile on my face, as my husband just made me aware that his blog somehow got deleted last week. He doesn’t know how it happened, and I am in shock. How do you delete an entire blog? I don’t even know how to delete mine on purpose… and his happened by accident. It should definitely not be quite that easy to do such a thing. Yet it makes some of the questions I ask in “Posterity 2.0” a little more interesting I suppose…

The other reason I’m re-posting is because I am taking a break from social media that will last at least this coming semester, if not indefinitely. It will be an experiment of sorts. I look forward to discerning how the lack of Twitter and blogging begging for my consistent attention will affect my student brain. We shall see. This post was one of my more enjoyable ones to write, so I thought it fitting for the occasion.

Till…

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Originally posted on April 6, 2011

Maybe this idea hails from movies and books, or perhaps it lies in family stories from of old, but I often imagine my kids one day discovering a dusty attic chest filled with letters and writings of mine/my husband’s. They would acquaint them with us in ways which speech would not allow. An organizational bin is already home to piles of journals filled with my own penned chronicles of life. We have some letters from our first few years together. I hope to have more.

But what of our “online life”? 

Last week I spent some time scrolling through my personal Twitter feed. I feel a little sheepish (and rather vain) to admit that reading through many of my tweets caused me to laugh aloud. Not unlike poring over pages of handwritten scrawl in old journals, my tweets evoked memories galore. Yet unlike the allowance of a physical diary, tweeting forces this apologetically verbose, wannabe blogger (oughtta-be grad school wordsmith) into dire straits of brevity. 140 characters constrains my usual uninhibited vernacular eruptions–which are being exhibited this very moment–into a tiny compartment. Happy remembrances of life have been kindled in looking back upon stores of writing and typing alike. I can pull one repository down from a shelf, while the other sits on a ginormous server out there… somewhere? They are both me, are they not? 

Although I have many handwritten journals filled with much pondering, prayer, and processing (which would give my children glimpses into their mother’s life) I also have a blog. My husband has one too. What of them? 

Blogging and tweeting may be generally less transparent, while journals and letters delve into recesses of myself I wouldn’t dare share online. But they are both personal (albeit in different ways), both aesthetically expressive of their creator.

My grandparents, my parents, didn’t blog. Didn’t tweet. Will their dusty attic chests filled with letters be our dusty terabyte hard drives backed up with blog posts?

Could I make both? Could I leave both for future generations to one day find? 

I dearly love the sadly waning medium of handwritten letters. Mail. I daresay I enjoy Twitter and blogging too, however. One medium uses pen and ink, limited only by the number of pages in a journal’s binding. The other employs Helvetica font, and allows for infinite scrolling.

Maybe I will print out our tweets. Perhaps I will tea-stain the papers impressed by our modern Canon printer’s CMYK color ink. I could burn the edges with a candle. Then they could be thrown into the attic chest to collect their own dust. Would that fill our digital discourse with nostalgia? 

Will the medium matter? Or will the writer’s content [his/her faults and foibles, digitizations and delights, joys and jaunts] found in the dusty attic chest effect heartwarming insight, regardless of cursive or typeface?