account – Earth Wide Moth

One day over break I spent and hour scrubbing the network of old, unused, or delinquent accounts I’ve been accumulating–the ungainly barnacles of passing, fading interests. I wouldn’t quite describe the process as cathartic; more like inane. For example, I dropped one Twitter account, Twittorician. And I tried to axe Mendeley and CiteULike, both for irrelevance and non-use, but neither of them provide an option to cancel or remove accounts. So, in Mendeley I deleted stuff and in CiteULike I deleted stuff and subbed in a cranky profile. Other candidates for deletion due to dwindling relevance include LinkedIn and Academia.edu. I left them alone, though, idle where they’ve been all along. They’ll give me something to purge next time I have a few minutes to spare.

The other Twitter account, now my only Twitter account, is also rotting on the vine. And while I don’t begrudge anyone their exuberance for Twitter or their invested participation in Twitter, for that matter, I find it less and less and match with the reading and writing rhythms I want (and need) to keep. My reluctance to delete the account, however, comes from…what, exactly, I don’t know. What if I change my mind? I used Twitter with students quite a bit last year, and while it did help me get to know a different and fuller side of EMU, not using Twitter in the same class(es) last fall didn’t subtract anything anybody seemed to notice. That is, when I dropped Twitter from the class, nothing happened.

Jill Walker blogged yesterday about a well-known blogger in Norway calling it quits. Granted, the blogger is a teenager and the reason for quitting apparently has something to do with a commenting quarrel. But quitting is quitting, yeah?

The series of account deletions (actual and deferred) along with Walker’s entry started me thinking again about how we imagine these distributed, immersive, networked writing practices ending. Will there be every bit as much contemplation of quitting (abandonment, retraction) as there is of signing up, joining, jumping into the mix? Call the net morticians; “bring out your dead!” Surely we can abandon it simply and without complication or second-guessing: leave the practice behind. Yet when “participatory” venues are overrun with the molts of once-active, once-present people, the muted exodus must gradually shape the experience. It must eventually alter the practice. Right?

(At least) Two forces operate here: 1) we grow weary of a particular networked writing practice or platform (such weariness itself can spring from many different causes) and 2) the network itself quietly and without much odor rots under our noses. We are not often enough bold about quitting, and when we are it risks sounding like a clamor for attention. Sure, we read occasionally about company-sized start-ups gone end-ups, but at the scale of individual users, quitting accounts, deleting web presences, taking permanent hiatuses, etc., these possibilities and their (non)consequences touch on something subtler, if, that is, we can get anywhere by generalizing about it in the first place.

A cardboard box in the basement hailed me last night to check its contents swiftly for a bulky album of news clippings from when I was in high school–a senior year now two full decades ago. Inside the box, a scrapbook; inside the scrapbook, an article; and through (or just beyond) the article, a faint memory one degree removed from this Morning Sun write-up of a humbling basketball loss: Dec. 4, 1990.

12041990

I don’t remember much about the game itself. I do recall the standing-room-only butt-kicking we took and that many of the blows were dealt solidly and consistently by the player opposite me–my defensive assignment. I doubt whether I realized at the time any relationship between losing (mistakes, failure) and development (dev. in basketball, humility, maturity…any of it).

After pulling an album from basement storage (a grand act of egotism), I’m already tentative–or on guard, assuming a defensive stance twenty years after I really needed one–about why this account should spark any particular train of thought for me now. Why should it? One mildly unexpected reminder has been that nobody was at that game–none of my family, anyway. It was a season opener. I came home that night around 11 p.m., and at her request woke my mom up to tell her how the game went. This is the flicker I remember most of all–I could not say what had happened. But what can I write now about a basis for this strange, childish-seeming encounter–an oddly wordless understanding? What was it?–anything other than a first memory of gestalt intensivity excising any expressive way forward.

Writing this mundane scene so dramatically seems silly now. I am tempted to turn it into an Oulipo exercise and retell it 99 ways, you know? Like this:

I came home after a crappy basketball game and could not explain it to my mother who hadn’t attended. Twenty years later, this silent-failed attempt to describe the game is what I remember more than the game itself.

Only ninety-seven to go.

Earth Wide Moth

Tag: account

Twenty Years Later