In another window I’m deleting all of my Facebook posts. Not the ones to groups; just the ones on my own profile. I’ve decided I’ll stay on Facebook to manage my professional page, manage a couple of volunteer pages, continue to moderate a couple of professional groups, and participate in other groups and get to see my friends (at least as much as Facebook lets me see my friends between the ads, the page suggestions, the memes, etc.).
I have mixed feelings about it. I like logging in to see my memories and I do like sharing. But I also think it’s time to wean myself off of it. I don’t like giving my content away in that way (pictures, for one) and letting someone else monetize it. Well, particularly THAT machine to monetize it. If it was some adorable little network I’d feel different about it, I’m sure.
Sometimes I get nauseous thinking about all of the data I have to swim through, all of the memories and connections and pictures and random thoughts. And I don’t even have nearly as much as the millennials. I whittled my physical journals down to a couple of banker’s boxes; I can’t even imagine how much room it’d take up if I printed out everything I’ve put out digitally. It’s too much. And does it matter if it disappears? Does it matter if I can’t revisit the specific memories?
Someday I’d like to organize the specific kid memories out for the kids. They certainly don’t need to know (or are likely to care) about what I made for dinner in 2008 but I’m sure they wouldn’t mind being able to page through the funny things they said and did.
Perhaps that will be my (far off) retirement project.
My entire blog is in a gigantic corrupted file that I hope I can still glean through because that’s a treasure trove of kid stories. I’m not sure how easy it will be to extract those anecdotes from the whole mess but it’d be a project I’d be willing to try.
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