All change please...this train terminates here.

[nevecat]

When I was twelve, maybe thirteen, I wrote about how I saw the world. Walls and masks and the power of names. Old head on young shoulders, seeing the world through NHS-framed eyes. I remember sitting and writing, sheet after sheet of spidery scrawl, loose-leaved in a binder

Comments

[bellabrigida]

Ah yes, 2001. We learn from our pasts. It's good that we keep reminders around.

At the very least, so we can keep learning from ourselves.

[ashekenaz]

Oddly, a similar thing has cropped up with the increasing use of digital cameras over traditional film.

Now it's so easy to just delete pictures that you don't like, or just don't seem like a good idea, whereas before it was nowhere near as simple, so you had to choose your pictures more carefully.

It's become so much easier to create and destroy information that I sometimes wonder if we aren't overdoing it, both in terms of out-of-hand destruction and the signal to noise ratio of some of the stuff that gets created.

[bateleur]

The journal deletion thing is pretty alien to me, psychologically speaking.

Many years ago, back when I was on Monochrome, verlaine used to keep an excellent online journal. Then, one day, he decided to delete it. It simply hadn't occurred to me that someone might delete such an important piece of writing and I was kicking myself for a couple of weeks that I hadn't thought to keep a copy.

My own stuff, I have the opposite problem with. I am constantly cursing the fact that even in the modern age our long term data storage tech is pathetic and I have no way to reliably archive things. What I do have, I regularly sift through. I need to do this because my memory is so bad - I frequently find things I had forgotten.

[bluedevi]

I know, I've been trying to track down a copy of Matt's old journal for the last three years - because I loved what he wrote since then, and because he said there was a good poem about tigers in it, and I like tigers. But the only person who seems to have a copy is Sanjoy who was Perezvon, and I've asked him for it again and again over the last year and a half to no avail. :( Anyone who *did* keep a copy has the ability to make me very happy.

I can't comprehend deleting a journal. Even if there are moments when you hate everything in it, deleting means you can't learn from your past. Or go back to it years later and realise how far you've come. nevecat, I'm glad you didn't succumb.

[cardinalsin]

nevecat, I'm glad you didn't succumb.

I agree - the only reason I can think of for ever deleting anything is that you wind up with so much stuff that you can never find anything. Doesn't really apply to livejournals, though.

[chrisvenus]

There is another reason to delete your LJ. It is, however, to do with throwing your toys out of the pram or something like that.

In most of the cases that I have seen of journal deletion its because somebody was in a bad mood and so hit delete, presumably so that people would worry and stuff. I may be right out but I think I've only ever seen one journal stay deleted and that is because (I think) of a huge falling out with people.

I have also heard of somebody who deleted their LJ after legal threats (somebody threatened them after they had defamotory (sp?) comment in their journal about somebody they used to work with.

But yeah, deleting things seems selfish if nothing else. Even if you have no more use for it, it doesn't mean that others don't.

[liriselei]

See you all - in hell...

keep those fires warm and cosy for when we get there.

[nadriel]

Happy birthday!