Our documented lives

I think I’ve confessed here several times that I like reading my old blogposts. In fact, I like reading my old blogposts from 2006 onwards – there was an inflexion point towards the end of 2005, and I hate my posts written before that. It was almost I was a completely different person.

Anyway, of late, these nostalgia trips have taken a different direction. Firstly, in 2006-10, I used GTalk fairly extensively, and most conversations are still archived (except for some people who explicitly turned off the saving). So once in a while I pick a random person (most often it’s the person who’s now my wife, and most of my GTalking with her was before we had even met) and check out my conversations with him/her.

Sometimes it just sends me on a bout of nostalgia. Sometimes it reminds me of what I (and these people I used to talk to) was like back then, and wonder how I’ve changed and so forth. At other times these posts remind me of what was “hot gossip” back then (yes, I was a major gossipmonger in my younger days), which, thanks to the fundamental fleetingness of gossip,  I normally don’t remember. When I remember such gossip, it’s a fun exercise to reconcile the subjects of gossip with their present selves.

Another activity I take up randomly from time to time is reading people’s blogs. Some of these have been mostly taken private as these people in question have embarked on successful corporate careers. I still have my LiveJournal account, so that helps me access some of these blogs (and others have kindly shared passwords to their now-private blogs with me).

The kind of trips these take me on is similar to what the old chats inspire – some nostalgia, some recollection of what different people were like back then and how they’ve turned out (I also make sure I read the comments), catching up on gossip of that day and all such.

In a way, I’m quite glad that so many of us live such documented lives! In that sense I quite hate Twitter and Facebook, for it’s bloody hard to search for stuff there (except for Facebook’s this day that year feature), and with a lot of documentation having moved there from blogs and GTalk, it’s quite sad!

PS: Sometimes I indulge in these nostalgic activities jointly with my wife, and occasionally it’s not fun, since she ends up discovering a part of my history which she didn’t know existed. Documentation has its downsides as well!

PPS: It makes me wonder what “oral histories” (I’ve always regarded them as a fraud concept, but I’ll save my description of those for another day) will look like one or two generations down the line, when so much of our documented histories will be available, if we choose to make them available.

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