In 2018 I deleted my Twitter account. I was nearing 100,000 tweets, and had something like 25,000 followers (at least 30% of them were fake bots, no doubt). The initial decision to switch off Twitter had to do with my physical and psychological health at the time; I was just too ill to keep up with the frenetic pace of Twitter.
My friends cautioned that online life was intensifying rather than helping my ailments; they told me to switch off.
Once I had deactivated my account, I discovered that I had forgotten what it was like to not be in unending debate.
Twitter, as a medium, pulls one into endless debates. Like most people, I enjoy engaging and learning from debate and discussion.
However, Twitter is a debating forum on steroids. It is a 24/7 soapbox where you can declare your opinions to the world and likely get some kind of response instantly.
Something else also happened once I left Twitter – I wanted to be forgotten, to be “unheard”. By wanting to be forgotten, I mean, I wanted to disappear completely from the online networks and not be findable.
I did not know most of the people I engaged with online but I was sharing all kinds of personal thoughts.
Once I left Twitter, I realised I was really speaking my mind into a virtual void, filled with digital strangers.
If you think about it, much of what we broadcast on the internet – on social media – is largely our own inner dialogue.
Because posting online is something we do alone, with our mouth closed since we are not actually talking to someone – what we post is indistinguishable from our inner thoughts.
This lacks a filter and lowers our sense of what is appropriate to share with the world.
The tendency to post our inner thoughts is what gets us into trouble when we are caught posting offensive or troubling things.
Now all of us have troubling or playful thoughts, but we once tended to keep them to ourselves. The internet changed that. Platforms like Twitter thrive off our reactive impulses to hook us into debate.
The consumer, me and you, actually produces the content that keeps Twitter alive.
Twitter needs us to be perpetually in combat mode – defending, advancing and fighting off opinions of virtual adversaries we never meet in real life.
While this may be fun, it generates an archive of our impulses rather than of considered thought.
Now, what you say in the heat of debate is probably not what you would say under different conditions of conversation.
Yet the online platforms can retain our opinions for years on end.
This is the problem I am having more and more with the internet and social media – that so much of it seems to be undeletable.
For historians and archivists, this must be extraordinarily daunting - for the first time in human history, the words and thoughts of ordinary people are being preserved at global scale.
But for you, the ordinary person, it is a nightmare.
Who wants their half-baked, impulsive, inner thoughts from 2008 to be remembered simply because you shared them on an online platform?
Whatever happened to words disappearing with the wind?
This is why privacy activists in Europe are fighting for laws to enable one to permanently delete traces of our internet life. The European Union is working on laws that enable us to demand that certain forms of online data be erasable.
This “right to be forgotten” and the associated “right to erasure” from virtual life are, for me, key moral rights.
To have our opinions forgotten over time is what helps us to move on from previous versions of ourselves.
The permanent archiving of reams of information, data and thoughts by the likes of Twitter and Google portends to be something quite ominous...