I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the way we use social media. It started out as an efficient way for us to share memories with our loved ones; now, these platforms offer us a way to be seen by anyone else with a digital device and an internet connection. That’s a lot of people. Thoughts may arise such as “Wow, my own personal memories have been viewed by a lot of people!” And to feel special about this. The same way as when a movie has a really full opening night, that means something special too. Social media offers us a little taste of this specialness. Finally, we can be seen. It’s allowed us to broadcast picture-perfect mementos with those far and wide; our lives displayed on our screens in neat grids and easily digestible profiles. But I cannot help but wonder, what gets lost in this digital landscape?

As a millennium-baby, I’ve been online socially for half of my life. Instagram was launched in 2010, and I joined the crowd two years later when I was 12 years old. Soon after, I joined Tumblr, and I entered the Twitter space when I was 16. Spending my youth in the cradle of social media, I’ve witnessed first-hand the metamorphosis of presence into performance. A beautiful sunset is seldom just witnessed anymore, but quickly transformed into content—filtered, tagged, and shared. I don’t mean to berate those sharing pretty pictures of the weather, I do this too, and often. But I myself am starting to feel tired. All of a sudden, I long for a life where I can simply do the things that feel good, not the things that look good. Every choice is so conscious. I could read the book that my mother gifted to me from a random charity shop in Telford because she thought I might like it, or I could dip into that carefully curated list on GoodReads for those who want to appear “well read”. There’s a tenderness in the first option, but the second offers the opportunity to convince the online masses that I am cool, sophisticated, and worth knowing. At this point I must ask myself if I even want to read a book for the sake of reading it at all.

“After all these years of displaying my life on the screen for others to consume, the idea of privacy feels radical to me”

Beyond this, I believe that there’s a certain melancholy to be found in digital preservation. Photos were once kept in leather-bound albums and tucked away in cardboard boxes in the attic. Precious artefacts that required intentional care to keep safe. The kinds of material things that you would run back into your burning house for. Now our memories float weightlessly in virtual space. What causes my longing for a return to more traditional forms of memory-keeping? I consider whether it’s my desire to touch something with my hands, to feel the texture of a memory. I consider whether this stems from a feeling that some experiences are too profound, too sacred to be compressed into flat pixels on a screen. I land on the idea of intimacy, and my longing for it. There’s a disconnect, in these images of others I see online. I want to reach out and touch them, hear what their voice sounds like. And not the practiced voice that’s spoken into a microphone, the voice that’s scratchy in the morning, and slurred in the evening after a glass or two of merlot.

Not only have our lives become so visible in this century, but the way that social media allows us to present ourselves is so standardised. These lives of ours, beautifully complex and chaotic, are pressed into the templates that we are given.The profile becomes not just a representation of life, but a mould into which life must fit. However, I’m starting to notice a withdrawal from these means of expressing oneself. Recent years have seen a rise in two phenomena that suggest a shift in how we desire to connect with others, and wish to present ourselves: the “indie web”, and “junk journaling”. One suggests that the online landscape is not what is reducing our individuality, rather it’s the constraints of the ready-made, mainstream, templates that we are given. People are retreating to personally-coded websites and blogs, like the one you’re reading this on today. “Junk journalling”, or scrapbooking, does away with the screens all together, implying a desire to collect our memories by hand and craft them by hand. To me, there is something beautiful and natural about this; people making the choice to preserve their memories and express them in a way that bears the marks of their personality and unique perspective. Choosing this path requires time, dedication, and can cause stresses that social media does not. But I think that in that very inefficiency, lies the value of it.

Perhaps what I really seek, is not just a more intentional way of preserving memories, but a more intentional way of experiencing them as they happen. I yearn for the power of simply living and to not feel the need to say “look at me World, I am living.” Some memories need to live in that precious, singular space that exists only for us. After all these years of displaying my life on the screen for others to consume, the idea of privacy feels radical to me — a quiet revolution of keeping more of myself solely for myself. I’m learning that though there is value to be found in being witnessed and feeling seen, genuine presence lies more in witnessing myself — to find meaning in an experience through my eyes, rather than somebody else’s acknowledgement of my experience. I want to hold my precious moments close, and trust that their values exist independently from their visibility.

Notes on Sentimentality

Translation in Tongues

Fragmented Production