Sticks and Stones

Photos. Letters. Cinema stubs.

These are all tangible objects which we have complete control over. No need for passwords, or the worry of contravening the DMCA, or needing ‘L337 hacking skillz’. But with much of our social interaction moving online to restricted websites, we lose control over our memories. The cute poke wars on Facebook, the sentimental messaging on MySpace, midnight conversations on IM etcetera. If all our fond memories are on password protected profiles, how do we return to them ten years on? I have forgotten the password to my Yahoo! email account and that was only five months ago.

Sascha Segan at PC Magazine wrote a thoughtful article about this phenomenon and the walled-off nature of having many separate online identities, all of which are ‘you’ but kept apart by the website. Segan ends with: ‘It’s time to reunite all these communications, before we look back and find that we recorded years of our lives on dead and forgotten Web sites.’

But perhaps we should all just do as Cafe Brewhaha in Australia has done and remove ourselves from these websites. It’s a nice idea, one I’ll think about more after I see who just poked me on Facebook.