I often waste precious writing time these days writing up YouTube comments. At first it was funny. Now it is beginning to get annoying, however, because it's like I somehow got addicted to it and...well, what is the sense of writing a YouTube comment really - especially the sort that I write, which are oftentimes not just one or two lines, like most people, but 5-6 paragraphs filled with my feelings, my thoughts, and my take on whatever the specific video is.
I guess most people would just say, what, stop writing them if you don't want to ,right, but that's the catch, really: YouTube videos and especially the comments underneath them, since it's like a conversation, often seem to naturally inspire me to think up very great responses , as though I'm engaged in a real conversation with someone, and it's usually only *after* I'm done writing my long comment that I'll realize I was doing all that inspired writing in the dumb YouTube box, instead of Microsoft Word (which is where I prefer to write, because I feel like a professional!).
Basically YouTube inspires writing for me in the same way that I feel a writer in the past would have been inspired by a letter being sent to his door and... when you think of it like that, I do think that it suddenly starts to feel as though there's something sad about the manner in which the YouTube Comments or, even, for that matter, message board conversations, are archived, when it comes to this generation.
How come?? It's basically because, if you've ever read anything about the writers of the past, you'll know that all their correspondences were rather meticulously archived oftentimes and not just archived but even published and widely studied -- occasionally just as much as their books. William Burroughs for instance, for all the traveling he did and even though he did not have a fixed address for almost his entire life, was actually said to keep very serious track of basically all the letters he wrote to his friends. Which means to say that William would have two copies of every letter he wrote, one to be sent, the other to be archived somewhere and saved.Back then they called it 'a carbon copy'.
What I find so incredible about this is that, when you swing open the books of letters that have been compiled of Burroughs, you come to see pretty quickly (and shockingly for me) that many of these letters are exceedingly short, not even beyond 3 or 4 paragraphs sometimes. Essentially just a page. And of course it's often the same with a number of other authors, their books of letters are often also filled with these very, very short correspondences, sometimes about the most random subjects imaginable; but i think I found it so intriguing with William because here we have someone who was always moving, never in one place (which is very much liek an Internet surfer, I always say) and yet he also made sure to keep track of those letters, no matter how short they were ...which at this point are, in my opinion, completely invaluable to studying and understanding him as an author. Looking at letters could not be any more different than looking at books....
In todays age though, it's clear to see that this idea has basically all but faded out of view for most of us. We value longer pieces of writing still, in terms of archiving, but when it comes to something short , like a 3 paragraph thing you type quickly in the morning to your pal on text, this is not at all thought of as something to archive. Not at all. This is now considered throw away stuff. People log onto the New York Times website and write up an angry 5 paragraph response (and oftentimes a very interesting one) in regards to the morning news...and then the next day -bloop--they forget it forever. No way to re-trace it. Just gone. Someone else will find it , but not you. For you it's gone. You forget the article you left it under, you forget the newspaper maybe...so on and so forth.
When it comes to myself for instance, I always say: I've been browsing the Internet since I was a 10 year old kid in 1999. I have written dozens of journal entries upon it. I have submitted photos upon it. I have joined poetry contests upon it. Been a member of various message boards upon it. Started numerous websites that then collapsed upon it. Had thousands and thousands (so it would seem) of incredibly long winded chat conversations on it, in a multitude of langauges. And yet ... when I look back at all my internet travels, guess what? There is almost nothing there in a sense, unless you start talking about Facebook or my own YouTube channels. Beyond those two sites (and in fact I have a big YouTube horror story of mass video deletion occurring once) I essentially have no way anymore to track down everything I was doing on the internet throughout my middle school, teenage, college, and even early 20 something years. Almost all of it has been lost entirely. It's as though I never existed, for years and years, as though I was just sitting on here taking things in and never adding anything of my own --- even though that was not at all the case....
I do not remember the usernames I used and typed under on many a message board. I don't remember the passwords for old e-mail accounts. My old MySpace account, or LiveJournal account, or maybe ...I dunno... some WordPress or Angelfire account of old, which all had numerous diary entries and photos and short stories of my teenage years, it's all lost completely, taken down at some point by the hosts of the Site when I wasn't looking, after forgetting abouut it for years, or just, as I said, the username and damn password lost to time ... and, since I never thought to store any of the files on *my own computer* (and then too since I've switched dsktops and laptops numerous times) there's nothing I can do about it. The only copy of everything that existed was in the Cloud, and because it just always seems like everything in the Cloud is there 'forever', it never occurred to me to make copies of it. Not a single time more or less. Basically the only stuff I still have from back then is , surprise surprise, the stuff that I just so happened to print out.
I suppose I would feel absolutely horrific about all of this, except for the fact that I realize this has happened to many many people and not just me, which is why in my opinion I think it's a sign of the times really, and definitely a testament to the rather bizarre nature of the Digital age. What we basically seem to have here is an age where , as a result of being able to store so many things so easily on such tiny little devices, we have thus obviously started to become rather confused, and we have a hard time keeping track of things, especially those of us, I think, who grew up with the Internet when we were just getting started , because we never really had a chance to understand how people used to store documents and photos beforehand, in the physical world. I think everyone has had the experience of going to a friends house, sitting down at the computer or the laptop, popping the screensaver off and being greeted by a desktop screen that is so filled with icons and documents you don't even know what is going on. In a way, this absurdly disorganized screen that most of us work with is a testament to just how hard it can be to keep track of things, even now in this so-called "Revolutionary" age of memory. We are literally drowning under the Internet and its seriously insane clutter. It's like a massive city and there are so many buildings in it that you do not remember which ones you have gone into, even so much as a day later, let alone 10 years or 15 years.
The plain truth as far as I am concerned is that, though there is clearly far more storage space (infinite), it is actually a bit more difficult to store things now, than it used to be, in some sense, nd a big part of this is because its not at all encouraged as a result of the fact that the Internet appears to be doing a hell of a good job storing everything for you, and keeping track of it, even when it really isn't. The truth of the Internet and its storage capabilities is that it's all just an illusion, and leaving your stuff somewhere (like, say, uploading your artwork to some random site ) is often like leaving your bags down in some random library room: You will more likely than not lose them, because you will probably forget the username and password, eventually, and then you'll realize...whoops! It's too late.
It's the same with every site, I'm telling you: You upload a bunch of long winded responses you type, for example, to a site like Reddit, and it seems like Reddit is storing it all for you, and though it is indeed doing that, the fact is that it isn't really storing it, in a way, for you *personally*. It is storing it instead for Reddit, and the other random people on Reddit, and for Google. It does not care about you. It does not care, really, to make something like a compilation of you and everything you have said, so that someone like myself can go back and look through your various comments and have them all in a sort of order just like I had the letters of William Burroughs. It isn't really too interested in making a sort of narrative out of your Internet travels. Only *you* can really be interested in doing that (just like only William himself was interested in making sure his letters were archived, not the Post offices across the world) but, again, the thing is that, right now, this idea of archiving is just thought of as kind of loony. It doesn't occur to us to do it or to take an interest in it because we are all blinded by the illusion. We really think the Internet is storing it all for us, automatically. There is even a ton of paranoia in regards to this idea. Which in my opinion is overblown...because the truth is that re-tracing even your own Internet footsteps, let alone someone elses, is next to impossible oftentimes (especially if you are hopping from computer to computer, I think).
Don't believe me maybe? Well, if you are a message board user or a Redditor or a person who likes commenting somewhere and you occasionally type 2 or 3 paragraphs even, then just copy and paste whatever you write next time, and then plug it into Notepad on your computer, or Word, and see how odd and lonely it suddenly looks, when it is stripped away from the workings of the website. Take someones Facebook status, for example, or even one of those "Twitter thunderstorms" people go on, where they type 10 different tweets to get out a paragraph, and watch how odd and utterly removed the block of text looks, in just some word processor. Maybe its jsut me; but every time I do this, I always think it looks so damn different that it's almost surreal...as though it doesn't belong anywhere else except for the website...and this to me just goes to show how, in my opinion, overly powerful these sites have grown for us now. In a sense, it feels as though they're sort of stealing our writings now, they're stealing our photos, they're stealing our memories and our own personal notebooks, and though they aren't necessarily doing anything wrong with them, they are definitely using them to sell a book of *their making* instead of our own making, and there is absolutely no way that this is fair. There's no way. We log onto a site like Reddit for instance, and we think of the people on there as, as I wrote above, 'Redditors', instead of what they actually are: INDIVIDUAL WRITERS CORRESPONDING WITH ONE ANOTHER. We literally wind up looking at everything they are writing almost as though it is just some sort of "authorless" thing beamed down to us from the mystical Cloud. The personal individualized footprint gets totally lost.
In many ways I of course love this, because I know how liberating the anonymity factor of the Internet is, and I wouldn't want all my writings connected across the internet , against my will. At the same time though, I think we need to start coming to an understanding about just how valuable some of these conversations and comments we leave behind on YouTube, Reddit, and Facebook are, and one way to do that, I think, is to rip them out of the webpage, as I said, and drop them somewhere else ... where they can sit by themselves, alone. Doing this lends an almost automatic importance and-what- thoughtfulness to the piece, whatever it may be, that simply is not there when it exists surrounded by the workings of the websites, and all the photos around it, et cetera et cetera....
just thoughts----------
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