I've recently begun culling all of my social media presence, and each time requested my data exported. It was mostly for my own research, to see how these companies structure their data and what analytics they might record, but it was an added bonus to get a database dump of everything I've ever erred online, zipped up neatly in a little bow.
I signed up to Tumblr in 2007. This blog became the place where like a magpie I obsessively collected anything and everything that struck my fancy: an outfit I wanted to try myself, someone I found attractive, a news article that reaffirmed my beliefs, some artwork I enjoyed, screen grabs from a new film, and very occasionally my own contributions – little breadcrumbs of another human being out there, somewhere in the world, archiving and building a visual vernacular. It's strange going through it again. I kept thinking that it must be so universal, but when going through each image, it couldn't be anything other than a DNA-like sequence: an experience still uniquely my own. As much as it represented what was out there at the time, it only encapsulates what I was interested in: a microcosm of the world wide web.
It was strange, looking through images that didn't represent anything in my life directly. They were just images that I collected. Some themes remained so stubbornly persistent — a nostalgic longing for anything vintage, romance, travel, and notes to myself in different typefaces; but palettes softened from bright, CMYK hyper-saturated colours, to pastels and millennial pinks. The earlier posts seemed represent the era in which they were collected (tights as pants, references to tights as pants, how tights were not pants, and girls with haircuts like David Bowie in Labrynth). Later images started to feel more like the person I refer to as 'me', today. I wonder if this is just as much about charting the times as charting me coming into myself, the breadcrumbs to the person I ended up as.
Running through each of them again in order left me feeling strange. These representations of affections, desires, hopes and dreams as a small selection from the zeitgeist were now only artefacts. Viewing them in sequence, I can see all the intersections of my life splintering. What if one scenario or another never happened? Are the most recent posts still hinged on a potential future? In the end left felt simultaneously energised and drained from considering the possibilities, and a stark reminder that although it feels like time is frozen now, it will always continue on.