I posted a thread on Twitter and then thought, heck, that’s a blog post!
As I continue to cull through old J’s Notes posts to reshare on the current site I run into the moral quandary of not just choosing what I don’t want to reshare, but how much I should edit what I do reshare.
For the first, sure, it’s kinda dishonest for me to hide some of the things I proudly shared in the last 20 years but I’ve grown, become better informed, a better writer (in some areas), and generally don’t necessarily have the same tastes as I did in my mid-20s.
For the second, I’m torn on how much I should “clean up” past content or just let is live as a historical document of, wow, I really messed up my grammar or used “pisses me off” a lot as a youngin’.
If I do edit, do I owe the potential reader any notation on what may have been edited? Does degree of editing matter? Am I overthinking it?
This is ultimately for me, I don’t think anyone out there is going to wonder what I thought about random links I found interesting in June of 2003 other than me, and I’ll always have the archive to embarrass myself with.
Also, anything I don’t include is probably available to anyone with a medium degree of internet sleuthing because nothing on the internet is private and everything is forever to a degree so I’m not protecting myself from future dirt digging (if needed).
This is also a hidden process, I could do nothing and no one would know, but the whole point of blogging for 20 years has been a certain degree of oversharing.
So it’s really about what do I want to continue to embrace and have my name attached to.
I don’t really owe anyone anything when it comes to my website’s content, but as someone with a general interest in history I think about what I would want to see if I dug into something like this.
Aritha van Herk had an good, thought provoking response:
And I’m ultimately torn on this – I like seeing history evolve and show that change, but we also live in an era where we give very little room for someone to grow as a person over the course of a lifetime, let alone a decade or so.
Curating is one thing, all history is curated, we don’t have a record of every moment of every thing, but editing is a different beast.
If history is edited, is it really history?
I’m not editing to hide anything, really, but even curating at this point is really editing an already existing historical record.
Chris O’Donnell, with one of the few active blogs I can think of that pre-date J’s Notes, added:
And the changed beliefs is the big thing, but does killing it off look like whitewashing?
I’m also probably being waaaaaay too generous to myself to think that I’ll ever be of any import that my past thoughts are going to matter one way or another.