internet time capsules

I've always been a bit fascinated by those old things you find that take you back to another time--old newspapers or magazines that might be stashed in an attic, for instance. It's probably why I have a few thousand old radio shows from the 30s to 50s I like to listen to when I'm out working the yard or around the house. It's why the books from 100 years ago always catch my eye if I'm wandering the university library.

Maybe you've seen those time capsules that get buried on special occasions to be recoved 50, 100 or more years in the future. There are probably many buildings that still have items stashed in the cornerstone that may be discovered when demolition happens.

It's also that way with things more personal. I've never kept a diary regularly, but there are old letters and other bits of writing stashed away here and there that I might run across every few years that can take me back a couple of decades to a time when priorities and ideas were quite different.

Still, there isn't much of that stuff. There are, though, electronic captures of moments in the past, and each of us is leaving a trail of our past in the technology that surrounds us.

I got my first cassette recorder in the 6th grade. I loved it, and used it so much I needed a new one a year later.

My friends and I used to do all sorts of performing on this device, mostly silly routines where we'd imitate our teachers or something. I used to have a lot of those around but I don't think I have any left now. Then there were the tapes an old girlfriend and I used to send back and forth to each other when we lived in different towns--I know I chose to erase those.

Still, these things are private, and we can make them vanish forever if we want.

With the web it's a bit different. We can forget exactly where we've left electronic footprints, and others can post photos or videos of us that we have no control over. I know, for instance, that somewhere one of my nanowrimo novel blogs still exists, but I have no idea how to find it. I suppose if I could find that unfinished transcript file on my computer I could then do a search, but why bother?

Many of us have joined or signed up for all sorts of networking, writing or photo sharing accounts on all sorts of sites. Some get forgotten. Maybe it's the myspace page after facebook wins out, or the livejournal abandoned in favour of blogger, but some do get abandoned.

Somewhere there are a few other blogs done for fun years ago that never got wiped out. A deviantart page with some writing and photos, a bunch of photobucket accounts, some flickr IDs, a youtube or two, vimeo, lastfm and more. I go to a page and see photos of people I don't talk to anymore, or read comments and conversations between myself and those who wouldn't talk to me now if I sat next to them on a four-hour air flight.

It's not ever really gone, though. Various places on the web cache pages with the result that if you know the right places to look, you cam probably still find that deleted account with your passionate accounting of your pokemon collection, or the photos from the good times in a relationship that ended badly.

Maybe that's a good thing, though. When we're tempted to paint another with a broad and unforgiving brush, we can recall when they weren't the one-dimensional dysfunction slotted into that drawer in our memory's filing cabinet, but someone we also admired, teased, cared about and even loved. We see that our simplification of them isn't likely fair or accurate.

That's only if we can bear to look. Sometimes I still do.