Twitter feeds are the new diaries – and they should be preserved as such
Afew years ago, I got briefly obsessed with memory, and how to preserve and remember daily life in a world of throwaway, ephemeral digital communication. I thought about the paper diaries that I kept growing up, and the pleasure I still have leafing through my parents’ photo albums. So, for a year I kept a daily account of life – not in curling script in a journal with a clasp, but on a Word document stored on my computer. I also got hundreds of photos printed off my phone from the year I’d just spent with my thenboyfriend in Berlin, and set about pasting them in to a large album, with captions.
In an ideal world, we’d all be storing our memories in photo albums and private diaries. But those days are gone – even my zealous phase of analogue scrapbooking and diarising dwindled after a year. It was too much work.
Much of life is now logged through social media companies online, and our memories – as well as thoughts, images, jokes, quips, missives – almost entirely stored in billions of locked-up chambers in the Cloud. But the current mess we’re in over the deletion of inactive accounts shows that what happens to this digital legacy when we die requires
careful and urgent thought.
When the journalist Deborah Orr’s very popular and outspoken Twitter account was deleted following her death in October, there was outcry at what effectively felt like an erasure of the woman herself. Further uproar followed when Twitter announced, last week, that it would purge accounts that hadn’t been logged into for six months.
In many cases, lucrative usernames are held by accounts that have been inactive for years, frustrating active users left with unwieldy Twitter handles. But Brendan Cox, the widow of Jo, the murdered MP, wrote movingly of why such a policy was grossly inadequate, as well as upsetting: “As my kids grow up, I want them to be able to scroll through [their mother’s feed] on a bored afternoon and just see it,” he said.
Following the backlash, Twitter backtracked, admitting it needed to work on how to memorialise people once they’re gone, rather than simply deleting their accounts.
Individuals have been quicker to recognise these issues than social media giants, increasingly leaving access to their digital assets in their wills. As Cox put it: “This is the modern equivalent of people’s diaries and letters – both as a historical and a very personal document.” They need just as careful a preservation.