{"id":13235,"date":"2012-11-28T21:32:43","date_gmt":"2012-11-29T01:32:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=13235"},"modified":"2012-11-29T04:53:14","modified_gmt":"2012-11-29T08:53:14","slug":"let-sleeping-memories-lie-high-school-and-the-facebookless-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2012\/11\/28\/let-sleeping-memories-lie-high-school-and-the-facebookless-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Let Sleeping Memories Lie: High School and the Facebookless Past"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>I hear there are people out there (though I\u2019ve never been acquainted with one, so far as I know) who really believe high school was the best period of their lives. It\u2019s a privilege to say so, but this position remains unfathomable to me. This isn\u2019t to say I haven\u2019t developed a retroactive appreciation for certain aspects of my teenage life; in high school I had no overhead, all of my income was discretionary, necessities (and sometimes luxuries) were provided for me, and activities like singing, debating, working on theatrical productions, shooting photography, and writing\/editing for the school newspaper (awww, analogue blogging!) were considered \u201cproductive\u201d uses of my time, all of which add up to a pretty cushy existence. Material and structural privilege can\u2019t necessarily buy happiness, however, and it\u2019s an understatement when I say that I\u2019m presently happy to have left the affective experience of my teenage years in the past.<\/p>\n

Recently, my Internet neighborhood has been revisiting high school through the lens of \u2018What if we\u2019d had Facebook Back In The Day?\u2019 On Monday, Nathan Jurgenson (@nathanjurgenson<\/a>) wrote about why we shouldn\u2019t be so quick to celebrate the Facebooklessness of our adolescence<\/a>; yesterday, Rob Horning (@marginalutility<\/a>) posted his well-considered response<\/a>. Below I consider both pieces, and add my own thoughts about the hypothetical intersections of present day Facebook and the pre-Facebook past. All three of us examine identity and \u201cdigital dirt,\u201d but where Jurgenson considers embarrassment and stigma, and Horning considers context and narrative control, I consider temporality and affective experience.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Jurgenson states that \u2018I\u2019m so glad we didn\u2019t have Facebook back then\u2019 (etc) is \u201ca common refrain among people who grew up without social media sites,\u201d and his argument against such statements<\/a> is threefold. First, this sentiment takes for granted that the net impact of Facebook on young people\u2019s lives is automatically negative. Second, it fails to take into account that a past-with-Facebook would have led to a different present; perhaps if we had grown up with Facebook, the consequences of past-Facebook that we fear now would be non-issues (either because our feelings or the world would be different).<\/p>\n

Third, and most importantly, Jurgenson is concerned that celebrating Facebooklessness reproduces the myth that identity is consistent and perpetuates the stigma against identity change. He suggests that, if we could all learn to live with a little \u201cdigital dirt,\u201d there\u2019s a slim chance that the coming ubiquity of documented adolescence might make it \u201cvery difficult to support the fiction of an identity that is unchanging, intrinsic, natural, or inevitable.\u201d If identity were more broadly reconceptualized as fluid rather than fixed, Jurgenson hopes, perhaps society would also become \u201cmore tolerant of the non-normal and accepting of change and difference.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Horning, on the other hand, suggests that while Facebook does threaten to expose our identities as inconsistent or performative, what really frightens us about Facebook<\/a> is that it decontextualizes our identity performances and \u201cencourages the idea that identity isn\u2019t embedded in context but is strictly a matter of data.\u201d For Horning, identity change doesn\u2019t automatically lead to stigma; as he rightly points out, identity change is both expected and glorified under its other name, \u201cgrowing up.\u201d The problem then isn\u2019t the digital dirt; digital dirt, like other artifacts and traces left by past selves, is something our successive present selves can recontextualize in new narratives that reinforce, rather than undermine, our current identity projects. The problem is that Facebook not only makes our decontextualized digital dirt accessible, it also promotes the idea that context is superfluous. Facebook may invite you to \u201ctell your story<\/a>,\u201d but the real message is that your story is irrelevant; each datum tells the truth of who you are, and no datum needs \u201ccontext\u201d to help it do so.<\/p>\n

For Horning, Facebook therefore points in every direction except<\/em> toward tolerance and acceptance of identity as fluid. It tries to actualize the myth of identity consistency by \u201c[encouraging] us to become a stable, consistent target for marketers,\u201d yet also \u201cmakes us vulnerable to having our identities \u2018remixed\u2019 by anyone who can access the identity information about us and verify we are connected to it somehow.\u201d Horning fears that Facebook will lead not to a future in which we all inhabit one fluid identity that changes over time and across contexts, but in which we must each compete with and account for a proliferation of crystalized identities built \u201cpossibly by enemies, possibly by bots or algorithms\u201d from the decontextualized digital data that Facebook makes available.<\/p>\n

To knit both pieces together: Jurgenson and Horning agree (as do I) that identity consistency is a myth, and that it is impossible to achieve (no matter how hard one might try). Jurgenson suggests that celebrating past Facebooklessness perpetuates the myth of identity consistency, whereas if we give in to embarrassment and accept the \u201cdigital dirt\u201d that leads us to celebrate past Facebooklessness, Facebook and its searchable timelines could help undermine the myth of identity consistency and thereby make digital dirt less of a liability in the first place. Horning, on the other hand, suggests that Facebook will both lead to a proliferation of crystalized identity-versions and intensify the degree to which digital dirt can discredit us. Both make a number of solid points (most of which aren\u2019t actually in opposition to each other), but on the whole I side with Horning\u2019s more pessimistic view. Though Jurgenson acknowledges that members of privileged groups would have to air their dirty digital laundry before digital dirt stopped harming \u201cvulnerable populations,\u201d it\u2019s hard for me to imagine a world in which the privileged sitting with their embarrassment would have any impact on the *-isms that provide the real discrediting power that digital dirt has for Othered groups.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Oh, middle school.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I want to suggest, however, that there\u2019s more tied up in our imaginings of a hypothetical Facebooked past than just stigma and embarrassment, or context and narrative control (though these are certainly important things to interrogate). In particular, I want to focus on what Facebook Timeline does to our perceptions of time and to our experiences of the past. Jenny Davis (@Jup83<\/a>) wrote last year about how Facebook Timeline extends the present into our pre-digital pasts<\/a>, but by making artifacts from the past readily accessible, Facebook Timeline also brings both the digital and pre-digital pasts into the present.<\/p>\n

In other words, while the documentary drive of social media may encourage us to see our present always as a future past<\/a>, it also fixes our past always as a part of our present.<\/strong> I argue that while there is nothing new about identity change or potentially discrediting documentation of previous selves, the ease of accessing such documentation makes our past selves and our previous lives more presently salient not just to others, but to ourselves. To express relief at a Facebookless past, then, is also to express relief that some distance remains between that particular past and the present.<\/p>\n

Is \u201ctelling your story\u201d via Facebook Timeline any different from that old-school analogue method of chronicling one\u2019s past, \u201cjournaling\u201d or \u201ckeeping a diary\u201d? Does it really drag the past that much more into the present? After all, Facebook Timeline is digital, and can be edited; I could reshape my Timeline narrative every week if I so chose, such that my past never showed anything beyond seamless, solid support for the self I claim to be now. In contrast, if I want to reshape the narratives in my paper journals, my choices are extremely limited\u2014and mainly include scribbling out, tearing out, throwing out, or setting on fire. If we stop here, it might seem as though Facebook Timeline actually offers more control over the past\u2019s relationship to the present than do older formats of self-documentation.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>To stop there, however, is to forget that Facebook is both social and Social<\/a>. I\u2019m the only person who ever wrote in the ridiculous (and still expanding) collection of journals, diaries, notebooks, blank books, Moleskines, scratch paper, and paper scraps that I still cart around every time I move; suspicions about certain members of my immediate family aside, I\u2019m probably the only person who\u2019s ever read any of that stuff in its original format. Facebook Timeline, on the other hand, is collaborative<\/a>; it\u2019s not just me telling my story, it\u2019s everyone who uploads a picture or tags me in a post or comments on my Wall.<\/p>\n

Facebook says this is a feature, not a flaw\u2014that its architecture lets our friends help us remember\u2014but this collectivization of authorship is a double-edged sword at best. I can untag myself, or hide things from my Wall, but I can\u2019t delete anything I didn\u2019t post; I can remove a photo\u2019s presence from my Timeline, but I have to depend on your<\/em> privacy settings to keep anyone from following the trail of breadcrumbs that leads from me, to our \u201cfriendship,\u201d to you, to that photo of me that you won\u2019t take down, even though we\u2019re \u201cfriends.\u201d<\/p>\n

Similarly, I can delete and untag and re-edit all I want, but anyone with access (remember, access to my profile is not entirely within my control<\/a>) can download images, and can take screen shots, and can save these things, and can launch them back into circulation long after I\u2019ve deleted them from my version of my Timeline story. My Timeline, then, can spawn not just one but a range of uneditable narratives (as Horning points out).<\/p>\n

Sure, a malicious person could also circulate uneditable narratives from my print journals. But circulating such material would require figuring out where I live, breaking into my house, determining which part of a chaotic box forest is harboring journal-fruit (good luck with that), carrying all that stuff back out through the box forest before I come home, actually reading through the material to find something scandalous, and then painstakingly transcribing or scanning the chosen passages in order to digitize them. We \u201cFacebook-stalk\u201d people because we\u2019re bored and because doing so is easy<\/a>; accessing my print journals would take a level of effort that I\u2019m sure no one will ever manifest.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>My purpose in sketching out these differences is not to be all IRL Fetish<\/a> about paper journals (I also have more than 3,000 pages of downloaded digital journal on my computer, and that\u2019s just from one particular platform). The point is that it\u2019s comparatively much, much easier for others to interact with the Facebook Timeline version of my past (and to interact with it in multiple different ways) than it is for others to interact with versions of my past that have been documented in older media. This ease of access means that my Facebook Timeline past becomes more immediate not just to you, but also to me. Even if I mostly ignore the far end of my Timeline\u2014even if I treat it the way I treat all those notebooks and journals I keep but rarely open\u2014my Timeline past re-announces itself to me every time you<\/em> interact with it.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been said that \u201cnobody wants to see your status update from 2007<\/a>,\u201d but that isn\u2019t always true. There\u2019s the usual range of school admissions officers, prospective employers, obsessive stalkers, and the occasional malevolent dirt-seeker, but there\u2019s also a practice I\u2019ve taken to calling \u201ctimeline bombing\u201d: I have one friend in particular who likes to scroll back and \u201clike\u201d items on the far ends of others\u2019 timelines, just to see what those others\u2019 reactions are when they get the notifications. Our Timeline pasts are dynamic, and lie even less dormant than do other versions of our past; they do not need us in order to stir and make themselves known.<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve argued all over Cyborgology\u2014including in some of the posts I\u2019ve already linked above\u2014that social media affects both how we see the world and how we experience being in the world, even when we\u2019re not using it and even if we never use it ourselves. It\u2019s quite possible, then, that the temporal implosion intrinsic to social media generally, and to Facebook Timeline especially, might over time change our relationship to and experience of the past. I further argue that a Timelined past is particularly always a potential future present, and that traces of selves captured in Timeline format have a greater probability of resurfacing when we least expect them to do so.<\/p>\n

Is this a bad thing? Jurgenson cites author Joan Didion, who advises us \u201cto keep on nodding terms with the people we used to be, whether we find them attractive company or not.\u201d Though I\u2019m far more a fan of Didion than I am of Winston Churchill, one could also add, \u201cthose that fail to learn from history<\/a> are doomed to repeat it.\u201d Certainly there are many reasons not to disavow or cut ourselves off from our own pasts and our own past selves. But there\u2019s also something to be said for leaving the past in the past (as much as is possible), and for meeting a past self for a quiet drink at a prearranged time, rather than running into clusters of past selves on the train, on our way to work, at a party, on a first date, or before an important talk.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>
Here, have a Past Self.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My own gateway Didion text was her stark memoir The Year Of Magical Thinking<\/em>, in which Didion reflects on the first year of her life after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack. The book is an exquisite and intimate portrait of grief, of all the ups and downs and\u2014yes\u2014magical thinking that comes with learning to live a different life after losing a partner of 40 years. One thing that\u2019s lingered with me years after reading The Year Of Magical Thinking<\/em>, and which is relevant here, is the way grief seems to dislodge Didion in time.<\/p>\n

As if in a movie cut on the digital editing machine she longs for in the book\u2019s first pages, Didion\u2019s consciousness quick-cuts from 2004 (the book\u2019s present-day) to 1964, to 2003, to 2004 again, to 1978, to 1968, to 2004, to 1985\u2014and makes far more stops. The 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston becomes her daughter\u2019s 2003 wedding in New York; a 2004 Boston hotel room becomes a 1955 Boston hotel room, becomes 1955 in Cambridge and Quebec and Sacramento, becomes California in 1966, becomes a blur of Hawai\u2019i, Greece, Cyprus, Milan, Paris, Bogot\u00e1, and Buffalo, NY. \u201cI couldn\u2019t even go to Boston,\u201d Didion concludes after this particular abduction down memory lane. Grief dissolves the mental boundaries between Didion\u2019s past and her present; with the two so intertwined, even the most minute and quotidian details of life become flashpoints of pain and renewed loss. Only at the very, very end of the book\u2014when she begins to let go and let Dunne become \u201cthe photograph on the table,\u201d instead of trying to keep him still-living beside her\u2014does Didion truly begin the difficult process of confronting the lonely future and creating a new life.<\/p>\n

Facebook Timeline makes it much harder for our past lives and past selves to become \u201cphotographs on the table\u201d\u2014and this is why I, for one, am glad Facebook wasn\u2019t around when I was in high school. Though I wouldn\u2019t welcome it, I could handle the embarrassment; it must be news to no one that in many ways I was more shy, and far more awkward, and far, far<\/em> worse at performing some semblance of being otherwise than I am now (which isn\u2019t to imply that I didn\u2019t make the attempt, but rather that the results probably alternated between \u201ccomedy\u201d and \u201ctragedy\u201d). I\u2019m even prepared to handle decontextualized recirculation; I\u2019ve a library of stories to sketch a path from here to there, though obviously I\u2019d rather not be forced into giving accounts. Self-presentation and self-documentation aren\u2019t just about how we relate to others, however; they\u2019re also about how we relate to ourselves.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>What I\u2019m not prepared for, and what I\u2019m grateful for not having to navigate, is a world in which my teenage experiences are anywhere near as immediate as they were half my life ago. There was far more to that time than na\u00efve reasoning and unflattering photographs and poetry scrawled on napkins; there was also an incredible amount of pain, much of which had little to do with self-presentation. Though there are plenty of cringe-worthy moments I still remember, what I feel most strongly toward my past selves is not embarrassment, but overwhelming empathy and compassion\u2014and that\u2019s why those selves need to stay in the past. I\u2019ve kept the photographs, and some VHS tapes; I\u2019ve kept the notebooks, and the rough drafts, and the letters, and the printed-out email messages. I\u2019ve kept all these things, but I keep them in boxes and in drawers and on shelves. My past selves and I don\u2019t just nod, we stop and get coffee\u2014but then we part ways for another six to twelve months, at least.<\/p>\n

Certainly unwanted resurgences of the past are not unique to social media. For instance, just before I moved to California to begin graduate school, I was visited in Boston by a high school friend I hadn\u2019t seen since the summer after our graduation. I don\u2019t think she\u2019d been in my apartment a whole 15 minutes, however, before she managed to bring up not only the most humiliating thing that happened to me in junior high school (it was bad), but also one of the worst things that happened to me in high school (it was far worse). The insult to injury was that her stories were inaccurate; things I\u2019d still believed were secrets had apparently been decontextualized, had been cast in new lights and knit into new narratives, and had been circulating who knows how far for who knows how long. To my infinite chagrin, I was still shaken by this encounter days after the fact; though I kept telling myself, \u201cIt was ten years ago; you have nothing to do with that world; it doesn\u2019t matter,\u201d the memories remained stirred and the injustice insisted on mattering. I cannot imagine having this experience on a more frequent basis, but that\u2019s probably what would have happened if there had been Facebook when I was in high school.<\/p>\n

For a large number of people, and for a wide range of reasons, destabilizing the boundary between past and present threatens a lot more than just \u201ctoday\u2019s impeccably curated identity project[s]<\/a>.\u201d Past selves bring with them past trauma, and past pain, things our present selves may have very good reasons for leaving in another time. Perhaps we should not be so breathlessly uncritical in our celebration of past Facebooklessness, but neither should we so readily criticize those who express relief that Facebook cannot easily dredge up what they have worked hard to move past. Some of us might be \u2018hiding\u2019 silly musical tastes or earlier political ignorance, but others of us are wrangling skeletons a bit more formidable than a stack of Creed CDs<\/a>. Sure, let\u2019s all celebrate our earlier Bourdieusian missteps (ask me sometime about going to my very first high school dance the fall after I learned \u201cthe Macarena<\/a>\u201d at summer camp). But as for the rest of it: let\u2019s let sleeping memories lie.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Whitney Erin Boesel *loves* old traces of others’ past selves. You can share yours with her via Twitter: she’s @phenatypical<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Photo of Joan Didion from http:\/\/www.biographile.com\/first-impressions-how-to-open-a-personal-essay\/8757\/<\/a>; text from The Year Of Magical Thinking<\/em>
\n\u201cMiddle fingerish\u201d image from http:\/\/renovationtherapy.wordpress.com\/2008\/05\/25\/the-trauma-of-the-20-year-high-school-reunion\/<\/a><\/em>
\nMom made a meme image from http:\/\/memegenerator.net\/instance\/18319351<\/a><\/em>
\nKimodo dragons and angels image from http:\/\/notacrazycatlady.com\/2011\/04\/10\/awkward-years-are-the-best-years\/<\/a><\/em>
\nEye contact first base image from http:\/\/www.quickmeme.com\/Romantically-Awkward-High-School-Student\/?upcoming<\/a><\/em>
\nAwkward teenage years image from http:\/\/www.singletracks.com\/blog\/uncategorized\/high-school-hormones-and-singletrack\/attachment\/awkward\/<\/a><\/em>
\nRooftop photograph taken by Elizabeth Johnson in the 1990s; scanned sometime in the aughts.<\/em>
\nAwkward highschool dance image from http:\/\/cheezburger.com\/3115771904<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I hear there are people out there (though I\u2019ve never been acquainted with one, so far as I know) who really believe high school was the best period of their lives. It\u2019s a privilege to say so, but this position remains unfathomable to me. This isn\u2019t to say I haven\u2019t developed a retroactive appreciation for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1875,"featured_media":13267,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[19684,942,19675,19681,51,347,19679,19677,19683,10651,3131,19685,3224,19682,19676,12097,1969,3795],"class_list":["post-13235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-commentary","tag-diaries","tag-facebook","tag-facebook-timeline","tag-facebooklessness","tag-high-school","tag-identity","tag-identity-fluidity","tag-joan-didion","tag-journaling","tag-journals","tag-nathan-jurgenson","tag-notebooks","tag-past","tag-past-selves","tag-rob-horning","tag-self-documentation","tag-stigma","tag-timeline"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/files\/2012\/11\/didion-dead1.gif","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1875"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13235"}],"version-history":[{"count":48,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13278,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13235\/revisions\/13278"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13267"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}