Posterity

This post was written on the 25th of June 2020 for context, and is in response to a video posted by Jenna Marbles to Youtube but serves also as a general commentary on the state of user-generated content driven websites which I have also mentioned in recent posts myself, a few of which at the time of writing are scheduled for release in the coming weeks which you should have seen by now unless I decided to delete them.  The reason I am adding this preface to this post will become apparent when you read through it at length but for brevity this information is provided for context.

I purge my online content on many different sites periodically, not just here on Blogger but on any website that allows me to submit content including social media.  The only content that really escapes this purge cycle for me are my published works which aren't practical to revoke, not least of all because physical copies exist in the British Library as is the case for almost all printed media here in the UK - you can find out more about this process here if you are interested as many non-writers are unaware of this fact, if it has an ISBN then a copy generally exists in the British Library with a few exceptions.

One of the reasons I periodically purge content as I have discussed before, is because of the fact that you generally can't control where someone's "entry point" is to your online life, it is impractical to create a "reading order" for posts on this blog and to try and enforce that order, you will usually arrive at this blog either from a search result, a link on social media, or from a bookmark, all of which are beyond my control as to which one you use to get here and where it takes you.  Right now there are 349 published posts on this blog and it is just over two years old.  I have had many blogs prior to this one and I have deleted those at a natural stopping off point for the same reason each time - the "weight" of the content.   As you grow as a person, your thoughts, feelings, and priorities all change as do your opinions that are formed based on those aspects of your life.  As a result, a lot of what you create that represented your thoughts and feelings in the moment are no longer relevant or no longer represent you as you are now, because your mental and emotional state has changed and your priorities have shifted onto something else.  I purge content because I don't have the time and effort to go through everything I create and re-evaluate it constantly.  How much effort would be required to do this is what I refer to as the concept of "weight" when I talk about online content, the more of it there is, the heavier that weight becomes.  I think the idea of living your life online is problematic because you have to constantly relive every moment and the more of your life that is shared online the heavier that weight becomes over time.  In your everyday life, your brain decides what is and is not pertinent to relive and recall from your past.  You do not constantly think about everything you did five or ten years ago, unless there is some trauma attached to those memories and even then reliving those moments generally isn't a constant struggle but rather something that gets triggered by certain stimuli.

I don't think it's realistic for people to simply say "well you posted it so you should stand by it" - that assertion demonstrates a lack of understanding of the fact that content consumption and content production are not the same thing.  Production revolves around intent, whereas consumption revolves around perception.  Production is dominated by the thought process of the creator, consumption is dominated by the thought process of the consumer.  To assert that you must stand by everything you produce implies that you have complete control over the meaning of the content and you don't, you only ever have control over your intent, you can't control others' perceptions of it.  Even when you take those perceptions into consideration during the creative process if you are lucky enough to have valuable and accurate insights into your consumer, you only ever have a snapshot of the consumer and therefore create content that is tailored to them in that moment.  When they inevitably grow and their perceptions shift, their thoughts, feelings, and priorities change then the meaning of your content also changes with their interpretation and you reach a point where even the person it was created for no longer perceives it the same way.

There was a time when I supported certain youtubers who I won't name because that's not relevant here; what is relevant is that I don't support them now because of a lot of things they did and because the person they are now is not the person I supported back then.  This highlights the problem though, if I judged them based on the content they produced in the past, I would support them, but based on the content that they produce now, I can't.  This is the other side of cancel culture where people generally get "cancelled" for something in the past that is dug up, these youtubers are people I no longer subscribe to because of what they produce now.

In either direction, I don't think you can live a life where every word you say and every action can be viewed as an accurate depiction of who you are as a person in perpetuity but that is the end result of having a site where content is submitted and remains set in stone.  It's one of the reasons I don't use Facebook or other social networks and why I purge twitter periodically too, I know that what was posted on those sites years ago by me were things I posted with zero thought before hand, the vast majority of which although inconsequential is still content that doesn't represent me anymore.  You can be as benign or as extreme with that as you want to be, from your favourite Pizza place to which Political Party you support. 

The problem with old content online is that it is always viewed in the context of what we know now rather than what we knew then.  Sites like Youtube through their design and their use of algorithms to provide suggestions are as much to blame for this problem, as no emphasis is placed on when the content was uploaded, and that is not a factor in whether a video gets suggested.  Content is treated as if it is timeless when in reality it exists as part of a timeline but that context is forgotten.  This lack of temporal context creates a weird paradoxical temporal stasis where people want you to grow as a person but at the same time stay the same, they want you to evolve as a creator but for your creations to be the same level and standard throughout.  For you to create content that is enjoyed by your consumer now, and every permutation and possible evolution of their future selves.  These concepts aren't compatible, and it's not possible to create this type of generic content and still make it engaging. 

You could literally record a video of you painting a six foot square wall white, and I guarantee you at some point that video will be considered offensive.  Is this political correctness gone wrong?  No, because without knowing the reasons why it would be considered offensive it's impossible to make that judgement.  As for the fact that to most people right now this suggestion will seem asinine that's the point, here in this moment with the context that exists in the present, this idea is something completely benign and generic and it is inconceivable how it could be considered offensive.  You can't anticipate every future outcome and still live in the present.  To actually live in the present you need to focus on the present not the future and not the past.  The problem with websites that accumulate content over time is that every act of consumption is an act in the present moment and the content is then consumed in that context.

There's a reason why your memory forgets things, why you do not carry with you every single moment of your life that you have lived up until this point, it's not relevant to hold on to everything and I believe much as I alluded to in previous posts there has to come a point where you consider whether that old content is worth holding on to.  In Jenna's video she mentioned that one of the reasons she wanted to keep all of her old content available was because she wanted to show growth.  This was one of the reasons I wanted to keep old blogs available but in the end I decided against it and saved the content for myself to reflect on but removed it from the Internet because that growth and that journey is not reflected in that content, it was never created with that intention, and as much as that may be your motivation for preserving it, you can't control the perception of the consumer, you can't ensure they see it that way.

So the question remains, if everything belonging to you online is used by others as a reflection of you, and taken as an accurate depiction of you as a person as you are now, regardless of how you view it, should you really keep it available?  If you have a Youtube channel or other user generated content driven presence that has thousands of submissions, should you perhaps devise criteria for whether content gets to remain in place?  I purge content periodically indiscriminately - everything goes, but if you did want to preserve some content then what options are available?  Perhaps setting a view requirement e.g. only videos with more than a set number of views stay available, or an age quota, e.g. all videos older than a year are removed.  There are smaller Youtube channels that I have seen do this, as their channel grows and their video quality, and production quality changes they delete older videos that don't match their current production value.  I've seen youtubers who play old games delete their entire playthrough of a game and redo it with better quality because their access to better production methods improves.  Granted these are technical motivations not social or political motivations but still this demonstrates the same principle of having the video itself be a better representation of what to expect from the channel and the creator now going forward.

Posterity is a double-edged sword; you know what you did, people who have been around long enough know what you did, you don't have to deny what you did or try to hide it, but if you wouldn't do it now, then do you have to let others continue to experience it as if you were doing it now for the first time? - That is ultimately what preserving old content enables.