Digital Vestiges: What Will They Have of Me When I’m Gone?

I’m often predisposed towards the melodramatic.

A few days ago, while waiting for the check at a restaurant, I thumbed through the seemingly infinite scroll of the Venmo app on my iPhone. If you’re not in New York, you might not know what Venmo is. And that’s completely understandable. I’m not sure what it is exactly either, nor do I know how to efficaciously articulate it. At best, I guess you could call it a mobile app that lets you exchange cash with another person very easily. It’s kind of like PayPal, only smaller, a little more graceful in terms of experience, and much trendier among the young’ns. I’m under the impression that not many people outside of my city use it.

The app also has this weird social layer tacked onto it. When you boot it up, you’re immediately greeted with an activity feed that lists every payment made within your friend network. (You can choose to hide your own activity from the stream, but oddly enough, it seems that either most people choose not to hide or most people don’t even know that the stream exists at all). Each individual payment indicates two things: the cash amount, and a description of what the cash transfer was about.

The description, interestingly enough, is mandatory, in that you’re not allowed to make a payment without jotting something down. As a direct result of this, the feed makes for very interesting reading. You can, for example, see that Emily G. paid Nora M. $5 for soup dumplings last weekend. Or that Mac S. just dropped $200 on Eli R. for something that he cryptically calls “Fun Times”. Or that Jeremy R. didn’t quite think about the visibility of his Venmo transfers when he typed in “Pregnancy Test” to describe the payment he made to Lauren G.

If I were more poetic, I’d describe the cascading wall of socially documented payments as some sort of “human tapestry”, a “waterfall of humanity,” or something trite like that. But in that restaurant, at that time, I was a few wine glasses in and a little morose over the state of my existence. And so instead of basking in the pleasure of witnessing what might well be a “digital cacophany of life”, I instead found myself obsessing over the idea of what we leave behind in the netscape. Which, appropriately, leads to a fanciful hypothetical: let’s say I kicked the bucket right here, right now. What will I have left digitally behind?

To functionally rephrase the admittedly narcissistic thought experiment: if I suddenly fell off the face of the Earth, right here and right now, what would my online tracks tell folks concerned with the prospect of my recovery?

Facebook

Mark Zuckerberg’s massive social network and human behavior data-generator is obviously the first place to look. Right now, the profile picture conveys a rather amusing image of an obese cat sitting upright. The cat looks grumpy. The profile picture was originally posted in the summer of 2013, perhaps indicating a lack of fussiness over the profile’s aesthetic. Hovering above the entire profile is a bold cover photo displaying Matthew McConaughey lying down, Cleopatra-style. Those close to me would recognize a running joke in my social persona; that I am a huge and possibly obsessive fan of McConaughey. A devotee to the recent McConaughssance, one might even say. I do not dispute any of these characterizations.

But how would it look to a concerned person in search for answers behind my absence? There would be little clue. I don’t normally make slices of life posts on my Facebook account; that is, the kind of declarations that many media commentators or Baby Boomer types refer to when they refer to millennials, typically in the context of calling us narcissistic, selfish, and pointless. Instead, my Facebook posts consist largely of attempts at one-liners (“perfection is when you seduce someone else’s cat”) and bare-bone descriptions of the world around me (“yoyo this café just pumped up dat norah jones this be some middle school jams yo”).

Pictures don’t reveal much, as they are either very old or taken by other people in a smattering of times and places. It mentions who my friends are, the places I’ve been, a few things I’ve done. But the profile as a whole does not seem to be anywhere close to informative nor comprehensive. I suppose the more detail-oriented would note, at the very least, that I possess a taste for the absurd.

My Facebook profile, then, is of no help to those in search of me.

(As an aside, this seems like an appropriate time to reference this VentureBeat article, titled: “Facebook usage data reveals just how ‘depressingly stereotypical’ your life probably is”)

Twitter

My Twitter profile gives concerned pursuers more to work with. As of this writing, my last tweet was sent out approximately four hours earlier, targeting an online acquaintance that I’ve never met before. The tweet reads, “OH HAY GURL”. It was favorited only once, by that acquaintance. Only four tweets were sent out that day, and from a distance they seem unrelated. But closer inspection reveals the beginning of a new job, and the tweets read as overly nonchalant.

The concerned pursuer benefits from this Twitter excavation by knowing that I was alive and kicking at least four hours ago, and that I had access to my Twitter account, either by phone or by computer. That pursuer would also know that I was in extended, piecemeal conversation with another human being. But should the pursuer contact the acquaintance, she or he would receive no further clue. The acquaintance lives a few states away, and the tweet was the first correspondence between her and myself in weeks.

Further scrolling reveals a spattering of non-sequiturs, one-liners, pointless observations, and meaningless nonsense. There is also a haiku.

Concerned pursuers would do well to move on.

Personal Website

Concerned pursuers will encounter writing clips, an outdated biography, and links out to my various social media accounts. The site contains no pictures, and has a section for a blog that was never updated. The last writing clip was published a few weeks ago, at the beginning of September.

Pinterest

My Pinterest account was last active approximately 15 months ago. There are three boards, two of which are empty. One of them contains a small collection of images depicting abandoned buildings in various stages of decay. Amidst the collection is a rather striking painting of some cyberpunk future. The collection is titled “places”.

The concerned pursuer moves on.

LinkedIn

A floating digital resume is, nonetheless, a viable source of dynamic information. Concerned pursuers will find a recent change in occupation, but very little detail in terms of the new position(s). However, they will indeed find a strange professional history: several research assistant positions, a recent liberation from graduate school, and current engagements in the tech startup scene.

Concerned pursuers will move on.

SnapChat

The missing does not possess a SnapChat account.

Yo

The missing only has three contacts on his Yo list. The most recent Yo, to “GARGEL995”, was pushed out approximately five hours ago. Concerned pursuers have no real way of finding out who “GARGEL995” is.

Venmo

Concerned pursuers would pick up my iPhone, boot up my Venmo app, and tap onto my personal stream. The last five cash transfers:

(1) Nick Quah paid Lesley A -$16.00 “Moopsies” (1 day ago)

(2) Shirin N paid Nick Quah +$38.00 “Ugly K” (3 days ago)

(3) Ally D paid Nick Quah +$13.30 “The flag.” (11 days ago)

(4) Lesley A paid Nick Quah +$57.46 [Computer Emoji] (August 23)

(5) Lesley A paid Nick Quah +$6.50 “Small wonders” (August 17)

The most constant recent activity revolves around someone called Lesley A.

I trust, then, that should I disappear, right here and right now, that among the first phone calls made – after, of course, contacting the usual suspects, including the spouse and the roommates – would be to someone who goes by Lesley A, who has had some constant monetary interaction with me over a decent chunk of time going into the past. If this were a murder mystery, it would be a fine enough catalyst to a long, protracted investigation, complete with red herrings and an arc that would befit Raymond Chandler.

But stripped of the murder mystery and concerned pursuers conceit, what exactly is represented of me through these social media accounts? What am I leaving behind with the things I do online?

I ask these questions without expecting an answer, and without expecting any solid Self to be emergent from these things that I have done. I ask them because this whole social media Self is a little haunting to me, and there’s a part of me that wishes I would do so much more with these social media outlets. That way, when I do in fact disappear from this corporeal form, concerned loved ones will at least have more of my digital shadows to hold onto.