an article and my shame

I read this article from New York Magazine all about how our generation has different ideas about privacy and memory preservation, as evidenced by our online lives. Blogs, livejournals, facebook, myspace, flickr... all of these document and record our everyday lives, PLUS they are all online forever. In this spirit, I'd like to direct you to my now basically defunct, but still existing, once regularly updated blog, www.asleeponcloud9.blogspot.com.

In a way I am embarassed by it, but somehow unable to delete it. One of the people interviewed in the article had no such shame, claiming that it was interesting for her to see what she was like back then, and to see her grow and change right before her eyes on screen. But I wonder if it is really me in there. I remember starting that blog because a bunch of my other far-away camp friends had them, and I wanted to be able to communicate with them without sending those huge mass e-mails. But it was still a little more to me than that... I could publicly bitch about my mom, problems at school, or whatever I wanted, without thinking they would ever find it in the annals of the internet. It was somehow subversive, and I was getting away with something. I don't think it was ever really widely read, or extensively commented on, and I never had people I only knew from my being online this way. Still, I wonder if its really me on there, or something else.

Anyway, the article was interesting, even if only insofar as it was something that I've been thinking about reflected back to me through mainstream media. When I was thinking about what I would do for my project, social networking sites did cross my mind as memory keeper-self-projection online objects I could look at, but in general are less textual and not as visually interesting or varied. Even if different stuff is on your facebook profile, everyone's is basically the same because of the format, while blogs and online journals are much more varied, I find.