If I Make an Instagram Account and No One Follows Me Back, Do I Even Exist?
as seen in “sorry i’m late (glxtch issue #5)” july 2020
I began to reevaluate the precarity of the digital archive after my Facebook account was deleted in May 2020, along with ten years of photos and memories.
In one fell swoop, I lost my original (est. 2010) Instagram account too, and access to the community I had curated for myself over the past three years. These losses were not devastating but they were symbolic. I had never - and on my own, would never have - deleted any of my online profiles on purpose. Like everybody else, I lost Myspace when it collapsed, I lost Bebo when it was taken down. In 2010, there was this social network for writers called Figment that I enjoyed as a teen, and I had some original fiction up there and when their site closed shop, I lost that, too.
The internet is full of cyber real estate but none of it belongs to you, unless you pay for a domain and hosting - but at the cost of losing the social aspect, which is half the fun. The memories, the interactions those spaces hold and catalogue, are on borrowed time. Who’s to say these sites and these apps - and the content they house - are forever? In ten years, they could become irrelevant, their parent companies could fall under economic duress and a CEO might decide it’s time to pull the plug, and with it, all that original content down the drain.
On an average day, I don’t dwell on this. It doesn’t keep me up at night.
Recently, my father’s side of the family gained an interest in documenting our family tree. I was already far ahead of them: two years ago, fed up with the confusion of relatives being named and mentioned that I could barely keep track of, I’d begun to list all my cousins, aunts/uncles, and grandparents. I use a website to store all those connections, and have catalogued nearly 300 relatives to date.
The funny thing about now having more family involved in this family tree process - there’s a WhatsApp group chat for relatives across America, St. Vincent, and other parts of the Caribbean and South America - is that pictures have started to resurface. Last month, I saw for the first time a picture of my father as a child, eight years old alongside his brothers. These archives have never before been accessible to us. Likewise, I don’t know what my mother looked like as a child. Or my grandmother. I don’t know what my maternal grandmother’s siblings looked like, except that once, when I asked, an aunt kindly pulled out my great-aunt’s funeral program to show me the grainy, black-and-white photo of her on its thin, paper cover.
The physical archive is precarious too: relics get damaged, discarded, lost. The things that are kept often have utility or value: a vintage dress, a treasured ring. The spiritual archive lives, too: the songs, the recited stories, the faces stamped into my face, my golden complexion, the inherited idiosyncrasies of my body and its habits all render my breath and my being an archive. My spirit recognizes the melody of the past and its old song, but my mind cannot conjure the words.
This ancestral pining is common, I imagine, among all members of the black diaspora…
…And well-known too, amongst other displaced peoples, whose land and ancestors were subjected to the violent legacy of colonialism and genocide. I think enviously sometimes of a Chinese-American friend, who only had to go to the village of their great-grandparents to find traces of lineage, to access that history. I am grateful at least, that when I walk through the neighborhood of my mother’s youth in the Caribbean, I can utter my grandmother’s name and neighbors’ eyes will flutter with recognition. I am not anonymous, I am not homeless in this country. Here a name has value, has roots - something it will never carry in America. Here, someone can place you. But when the elders die, and their memories ash, who will I be then?
I find some comfort in the thought that theoretically, my children will know me more than I ever knew my mother and father. They’ll have the physical 4x6 photos from my childhood: me as a baby, a toddler at the park, to squint for resemblances: like a game of Spot The Difference.
And if the internet doesn’t die by then - if my Tumblr, which I joined in 2009 (making it now my longest standing social media archive!) - if that still exists in ten years, twenty years, my child will be able to effectively peruse my diaries, and that’s better than any photo. I would have been fascinated to learn what my mother thought about at sixteen, how she styled herself, what she dreamed of as a child. In theory, these archives are my coming of age story. I remember the day my mother mortified me by reciting back to me the contents of the middle school diary I hid under the mattress (to which she had a spare key), and from then on I was fearful of ever revealing my heart where her eyes could see. And thankfully my mother was not tech-savvy, and her paranoia did not extend to my online activities, which is how blogging became my pastime and my early friends, virtual.
I’m not mourning the loss of my personal Facebook account because I’m addicted to social media. I mourn it because empirically, I use these platforms to track my moods. To showcase my participation in trends.
The internet has utility beyond being a learning tool. It houses the collective memory of a generation.
The friends I met within these spaces will be guests at my wedding, you know? Online we participate in trends, we trade memes, we create new language, we engage in discourse, we join fandoms and align with personalities who share our interests or excite our curiosity. The internet is an exchange, a remembering, a gathering.
I remade my Instagram, begrudgingly decided to start over on Facebook. I really love Insta, I love carving out a space for myself to be colorful and soft and magical. This moment of renewal is unexpectedly fun as I weave older throwback photos with recent selfies, quilting my new and old selves together in splashes of vibrant hues. Reconnecting with old mutuals and establishing new ones. I cannot vouch for the longevity of these accounts, but at the end of the day, I feel obligated to nourish them. To keep a record of myself even if only to remember that I exist.