An Archive of Digital Ghosts
We are all haunted by digital ghosts. Some of us more than others. They pop up when we least (or most) expect it. In our Facebook memories, in emails, direct messages, Google searches when we are seeking something or someone else. Their faces linger in the last profile photos they uploaded, forever frozen at the age you remember. Their voices echo in comments left long ago, messages you forgot they sent, recordings you stumble across on your phone. The more people you lose, the more the internet starts to become a graveyard.
I have been haunted by digital ghosts for most of my life. I have more than most people my age and my lifelong obsession with memory guarantees a haunting on a daily basis. I click on my memories daily, bracing myself for the pain. My sister, my best friend, my father, and so many more that I’ve lost are always speaking to me across the years in the digital spaces.
I grew up alongside the internet, and in the beginning it was something unheard of. A safe space. For me, for the geeks and the nerds who didn’t fit in. I made friends in fandom spaces where we connected over the things we loved. That was before it all became toxic, before the internet became a cesspool where I rarely wanted to speak up or write for others. I cut my teeth writing fanfiction, or delivering poetry and prose to my friends on Livejournal (I was an early adopter).
My Livejournal still exists for one simple reason, it is one of the places I can still find my digital ghosts when I miss them. I can go there and read my best friend’s words from the years he and I were inseperable. I can revisit my first love, the relationship that primarily existed online captured for posterity in our dramatic exchanges there. It is also a place I can revisit the ghost of my former self. Where I can read my old writing and either cringe or marvel at the quality. I cannot bear to delete it, to lose all of those memories and access to the people I lost. Even now when Livejournal has been purchased by a sketchy Russian company and I have no idea what they’re doing with all of our words, our ideas, the intensity of our feelings. How have they warped my digital ghosts? I may never know, but I cannot bear to let them go.
I don’t write much online anymore. There is a blog on my photography website that contains essays that I wrote in college, eulogies, and poetry. There is another blog dedicated to the articles I wrote for a pop culture website during the pandemic. The one that screwed over all the writers and deleted all of our work so there is no longer an official record of the years we spent building an audience and a voice.
In my years writing for the internet I have been fortunate to have audiences online that loved me and made me a better writer. I’ve also had vitriol thrown at me by fanboys who hated that I had the audacity to voice my opinions about popular franchises that I’ve followed for most of my life. The last stint I spent writing online professionally disillusioned me greatly. I felt like I was constantly shouting into the void and no one cared. But sometimes I remember what exists in that void. The digital ghosts that I hold onto so tightly. I still speak to them. I can still speak for them.
There is a quote that is constantly ringing in my head. “We live as long as the last person who remembers us.” I don’t know who said it, or where I first heard it. (One of the internet sources I found credits it to Native American musician and activist Floyd Red Crow Westerman.) And I remember so much.
I’ve always had an obsession with memory, terrified of forgetting important moments, details, people later in life. As a photographer my memory is extremely visual, which has become both a blessing and a curse in recent months. As a writer I have a keen ear for dialogue, it is difficult for me to forget words spoken to me even when I want to. I have been telling the stories of my ghosts for years, even before they were gone. I’ve always recounted my sister’s exploits and adventures as if they were my own, that’s how well I know her stories. And all I can do now to keep my digital ghosts alive is to tell their stories. To keep remembering them.
So here I am once more writing for the internet. But this time I’m not writing for an audience, coming up with better ends to stories, or even trying to make money. I’m here to keep them alive, to flesh out the digital ghost until they live and breathe on the page. Maybe then I’ll be able to bury them.
So here it is, a new journal where I chronicle the stories of all those I’ve loved and lost. This is all I can think to do in order to aid my own healing, to process my grief that follows me like their death shrouds. Maybe others will read these stories and come to know them and love them like I did. Or maybe documenting my own grief might help others going through something similar. If you are here and you are reading, please feel free to follow for more. And if you do comment, please be gentle.
In the end we all become digital ghosts. And I will remember.
