What will be left of us online after we’re gone? For me, I hope it’s a collection of hot selfies, sassy tweets, and maybe even some writing that made people think (or at least, angry in the comments). But the reality is that so much of the trails we leave online aren’t up to us.
Perhaps that’s why digital ephemerality – material existing online only briefly – is so alluring. In a digital ecosystem that relentlessly creates, extracts, stores and monetises our data, it’s no wonder that the notion of temporary content is appealing. There’s a certain sense of freedom in the knowledge that things won’t last for ever.
Many of my friends live far away, so our friendships are almost entirely online. Our chat – sometimes meaningful, often mundane – documents the daily rhythms of our lives, flowing through networks and leaving a trail of seemingly endless upward-scrolling through text bubbles, emoji reactions, photos, and countless hours of monologising voice notes. Almost the entire lifespan of our friendships could be documented and searched. But it’s not. It disappears after four weeks. That’s because we’ve decided to turn on one of my favourite app settings: disappearing messages.
Disappearing messages is a feature offered by apps like Signal and WhatsApp, giving users the option to have conversations that self-destruct. They’re not the only platforms that have tapped into the allure of digital ephemerality. The very premise of Snapchat is that content is only viewable for a short window; Instagram stories similarly vanish after 24 hours. Those who are chronically online may remember the last day of X’s own foray into expiring content called “fleets”, when countless users threw whatever remaining posting-caution they had to the wind to share revealing, horny or outright unhinged posts for one final hurrah before the feature itself vanished. I can’t tell you what people posted or link you to evidence of this because, well, it’s gone.
You just had to be there.
And that, to me, is part of the appeal of disappearing messages. I don’t catalogue every moment spent with loved ones when we’re together in the physical world, and there is something powerful about applying the same approach to my online life.
Mark Zuckerberg was right in saying that “not all messages need to stick around for ever.” If only he could extend this kind of thinking to unpick the deeply privacy-invasive and data-exploitative business model that underpins his digital empire.
This points to an important caveat: just because content disappears for users doesn’t necessarily mean companies aren’t hanging on to it. For example, Instagram came under fire when it kept deleted photos and messages on its servers. This is partly why we can’t place all of the burden upon individuals to protect their own privacy – no matter how many privacy settings you change, companies that turn a profit on surveillance will continue to exploit data as long as they can get away with it.
Despite my love for disappearing messages, I’m also sentimental. I care about preserving memories. Sometimes it saddens me to think of the countless messages that have been lost into the automated abyss. And yet, it seems to me that logging everything might make nothing particularly special. Plus, it’s disturbing to consider how our careless digital exhaust is clogging up servers in massive data warehouses and contributing to significant environmental damage.
Using disappearing messages forces me to be deliberate about what to keep. Rather than outsourcing my memory-making to digital intermediaries, or relying on the assumption that I’ll always be able to search through the catalogue of my life, I have to preserve my digital life in a way that is meaningful.
And this isn’t just personal. Despite the feeling that everything on the internet lasts for ever, this often isn’t the case. Groups like the Internet Archive are doing important work building public digital archives.
Of course, there is complexity here. For some, chat logs can be an immensely useful memory aid; a tool to assist social interaction and enable recall. There are also situations in which records of conversations are useful or even necessary for transparency, accountability and as evidence of wrongdoing. I have written about the tensions between protecting privacy and the challenges of not having a digital trail when seeking justice.
It’s not always easy to know what to remember and what to forget and frictions can arise between privacy, transparency and accountability. But a “keep everything” versus “destroy it all” dichotomy isn’t going to cut it. There is power in the ability to decide how and when things should be permanent, and too often that decision isn’t ours. For me, some of my most treasured group chats are beautiful, at least in part, because they are fleeting.