The Worthlessness Of Digital Footprints
Does it really matter what you digitally leave behind?
I won’t lie, I do think that the phrase “digital footprint” is a little amusing, but also very definitely tainted with a hint of melancholy too — almost an aspiration of something that’s fundamentally unattainable and pretty much meaningless.
Let me elaborate.
Do you genuinely think it’s likely that the path you’ve trodden during your digital (presumably online) life is actually worth something more than Proustian recollections of smiles, tears, and (a hint or more of) regret to those that live on after you?
Are they not just merely impressions on some soggy wet sand before the inevitable tide of increasingly over monetised technology comes in and wipes them all away, out of the plane of existence, forever?
I see them a lot, footprints that is, during my habitual morning walk along the commonly howling Atlantic coast. Sometimes there are many tracks, all criss-crossing with each other, lives intermingling at the same time or maybe different times as you can’t really tell, other times just a solitary trail leading out of sight to who knows where.
It’s the single tracks that make me feel saddest¹ as I do wonder that if I hadn’t noticed them, then most likely few others, if anyone, would have…
