Microprocessing
Your Teenage Email Account Is a Lost Time Capsule
If you lose access to virtual memory spaces, some of your memories might go out with it
The internet is a time capsule. Like an external hard drive or a diary tucked under your mattress, the email accounts, instant messenger conversations, and blogs of our past hold nostalgic and sometimes even crucial memories. But just as an external hard drive is susceptible to file corruption and a diary might get lost in a move, we can lose access to that essential repository of memories. If you haven’t somehow preserved that information — by printing out important correspondences or forwarding your emails, for example — those memories could be lost in the ether, never to be experienced again.
“I desperately want to get into old emails to learn from my younger self, especially my more hopeful and excited writer self before the age of social networks,” says Teena Apeles, a writer based in Los Angeles. “I want to find my first ever email, I think in 1995. Who did I email? How different were those emails? How did we all communicate then?” Apeles did, in fact, think to print out several email threads before she lost access to her accounts, but they aren’t the ones she most wishes she could revisit.
