A History of Nonsense
I know this is silly...
But as I've been going back and looking through my posts on LJ and during my long stint on Blogger, I've been wrestling with some questions. Particularly during the first few years on LJ, I was away at college, and what seems like 9/10 of my posts were something along the lines of "I'm working on a paper/I should be working on a paper but I'm doing this instead," etc. This makes for spectacularly boring reading, for me and probably even moreso for anyone else who might happen to read through the archives.
In addition, I'm thinking about posting the entries from the time on Blogger into LJ so that I will have everything in one place. The content of those entries is pretty similar, for the time I was away at school.
The question is, despite the shallow, inconsequential nature of the posts, do I have a duty to keep them as they are in order to preserve the true record of 1) what I was doing then and 2) what I was posting then? There are several basic principles of history that apply here, but I'm not going to list them all.
This option of deleting previous posts is just a means of editing one's own historical record; in the same way you might toss out a notebook you kept in middle school containing rants about your latest crush and your dark, soul-baring goth poetry.* The stuff that makes you cringe with embarrassment when you read it later, to the point where you never want anyone (including yourself) to read it again. If you do NOT allow yourself to edit/erase these things, the 'paper trail' of your life remains truer to that person you were at the time, and shows your evolution; if you DO excise these things from your record, it probably makes your overall 'paper trail' better reflect the person you are at the present time. Which is better? I have no idea.
I just keep wondering, when I am old and grey and presumably reading over my posts from when I was 19 or 20 or so, would I miss those posts? Will it matter, as Kim omdog says, if I forget I wrote a sentence about how many pages I was up to on a 10-page paper? (Not to mention, the post before it where I mentioned I was starting it, then the posts following it where I continued to update the page count and finally said I was done.) I still have the memory of writing paper after paper in college. Do I have to keep the written reminder?
*sigh* Any thoughts would be appreciated... and congrats to the people who made it all the way through this bit of over-analysis.
* ...No, I did not write dark, soul-baring goth poetry. It's just an example.
But as I've been going back and looking through my posts on LJ and during my long stint on Blogger, I've been wrestling with some questions. Particularly during the first few years on LJ, I was away at college, and what seems like 9/10 of my posts were something along the lines of "I'm working on a paper/I should be working on a paper but I'm doing this instead," etc. This makes for spectacularly boring reading, for me and probably even moreso for anyone else who might happen to read through the archives.
In addition, I'm thinking about posting the entries from the time on Blogger into LJ so that I will have everything in one place. The content of those entries is pretty similar, for the time I was away at school.
The question is, despite the shallow, inconsequential nature of the posts, do I have a duty to keep them as they are in order to preserve the true record of 1) what I was doing then and 2) what I was posting then? There are several basic principles of history that apply here, but I'm not going to list them all.
This option of deleting previous posts is just a means of editing one's own historical record; in the same way you might toss out a notebook you kept in middle school containing rants about your latest crush and your dark, soul-baring goth poetry.* The stuff that makes you cringe with embarrassment when you read it later, to the point where you never want anyone (including yourself) to read it again. If you do NOT allow yourself to edit/erase these things, the 'paper trail' of your life remains truer to that person you were at the time, and shows your evolution; if you DO excise these things from your record, it probably makes your overall 'paper trail' better reflect the person you are at the present time. Which is better? I have no idea.
I just keep wondering, when I am old and grey and presumably reading over my posts from when I was 19 or 20 or so, would I miss those posts? Will it matter, as Kim omdog says, if I forget I wrote a sentence about how many pages I was up to on a 10-page paper? (Not to mention, the post before it where I mentioned I was starting it, then the posts following it where I continued to update the page count and finally said I was done.) I still have the memory of writing paper after paper in college. Do I have to keep the written reminder?
*sigh* Any thoughts would be appreciated... and congrats to the people who made it all the way through this bit of over-analysis.
* ...No, I did not write dark, soul-baring goth poetry. It's just an example.