When I first started journaling again after years of not doing so (If you’re reading this, thank you, Professor Kellogg), I did so with pen and paper. Mostly due to an exercise Professor Kellogg had us do by finding comfort in the mistakes you make along the way. That that too is art. Is expression. Is personality. Most of my classmates eventually regressed back to pencil for notetaking or digital devices, but it is a practice that has stuck with me even till today.
When I first started dating my now girlfriend, she noticed me writing in ink. Every so often, I’d mess up and just strike through the words that were misplaced in my notes. She’d ask me why I didn’t write with a pencil. To which, I told her what Professor Kellogg told me and that over time, it became a habit. It made me write more intentionally. Also, I will note that ink looks better on paper than graphite does. At least when it comes to writing. High contrast, you know.
I grew up at the tail end of the Kodak and camera roll. I remember a time when every picture had to be taken with intention. With purpose. The framing had to be right. The lighting had to be perfect. The eyes had to stay open on flash. We now live in a world where digitial hoarding has become really, really easy. Google’s got me good, making m pay more and more as I somehow never delete emails anymore, only archiving them. One of my good friends has over 35,000 photos on her iCloud, and hasn’t deleted a single one since the first one was taken. Still a crazy number to me.
At the same time, the ephemera of the internet makes things easy to forget. Easy to erase. Public and private mistakes are erased as if there’s no digital footprint in the first place. Nearly every messaging platform allows you to delete a DM you send. I say “nearly” since I haven’t tried every single one out there. But it’s most likely, all. Snap was born on the idea of erasure, something many other platforms have inherited. Any post, tweet, or website can be erased. Many assume that you write in pencil, but forget even after rubber absorbs the graphite into its folds, the indelible imprint still exists. Watch any spy moie where they smear more graphite over an erased string of words to reveal the negative spacing of the letters that were, if you don’t believe me.
So, for those who share their voice in whatever capacity on the digital world, never forget the echo. The web archives exist. “This message has been deleted” exists. Local downloads exist. Witnesses exist. Screenshots exist. Granola exists.
As our civilization gets closer to a world that never forgets, what more can we do?
What less should we do?
Just a gentle reminder that we all write with pen on paper.
Photo by Nicolas Thomas on Unsplash
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