Published in
RADAR Magazine #2
2025
RADAR Magazine #2
2025
Born with the century in the blessed year 2000, I grew up alongside the interwebs. I came of age when snapchat and instagram were taking their first steps, staining all our rites of passage with a new set of colors: those of the shown, the linked, the instantaneous. We fumbled and stumbled, there was a whole arsenal of gestures to invent. This piece is extracted from a notebook of mine in which lives ongoing research, a work of memory collection, where I gather impressions and exchanges about the vast field where the intimate and the internet meet and melt into each other.
What follows are filigrained trains of thought, speculations on the online as a webbed archive of our intimacies.
ARCHIVE OF SELF // TO BE ONLINE
- Versions of self pop up everywhere: I bump into the middle school me in a Facebook “memory”. unless i’m looking for housing, I never go on facebook anymore. Meteoric mnesic return to a time where it was daily, the town square where I would hang out. The world of subtweets, of counting likes on my cover pic, the fb groups and private jokes between friends. Of hey wyd nm hbu same cool imma log off me 2 ok bye ttyl. Trippy to remember that we used to log off.
- The idea of a blog. Where have they gone? Everyone shares themselves everywhere now. Iconic, era defining: myspace, tumblr. On youtube, the vlogs. Forums as well, strikes me as a huge archive of intimate stories.
- Personal writing, the autobiographical. To tell one’s story, to narrate oneself, unfiltered, online, immediately. On your story. Story. That word, so innocently... It’s all about narrative. Public figures being intimate online: confessions, vulnerability, shamelessness, non-existent shyness. Live streams. The closeness of an instant audience, one click away. Huge success of this type of content. Emma Chamberlain (note: write a whole piece about her)
- There is an APA, Association for Autobiography [in France], that collects and organizes self-writing, personal archives (not those of famous people, but of regular people). Historical, literary, ethnographic value of self-writing. I often think of the internet as a vast corpus of self-writings. So many self-portraits, intimate and exposed. In one single image or fragment of text, but also as a whole, in the entirety of a grid, a profile, the evolution of an about me page over time.
- Whether we have a diary habit or not, being on social media behaves as a self-reflective practice, in spite of ourselves. It’s a practice of looking at ourselves by showing ourselves. and then we get the opportunity to look at ourselves looking at ourselves. Accidental archives, that reveal, not who I am, but how I want to be perceived, have wanted to be perceived through the years. Instagram as a hall of mirrors. A portrait gallery of versions of selves, past, present, instantly past again. The effect is even more visible, in a more absurd way, on Linkedin.
- An abyss between my inner voice now, and the me that I read when I see what I wrote (texted) in the past. I seek out cohesiveness between these people. Sometimes I find it, I reassure myself. “I was young” (but I can't be fooled: tomorrow I will be young today)
ARCHIVE OF THE EXPERIENCED // TO BE IN THE WORLD
- Places I’ve been, even the most intimate ones. Strangeness of google maps that saves each one of my movements. I remember feeling a sudden panic, contemporary paranoïa, so I toggled off the automatic saving and deleted the history when google offered that option to me in 2020. Recently, not remembering this, I thought to myself how I would love to see this archive. Regret, short but real, of having deleted it. I wish I still had that archive, despite how intrusive and surveillance-ridden it is.
- Places where I’ve stayed. Seeing the photos on my own profile shift from Marseille, to Bordeaux, to Paris, to New York. The people I am, changing as well, in each new city a new, slightly different way of posting, local mannerisms seep in. “She posts like a parisian, as in, I don’t care, but it’s actually quite studied, you know”, heard in a conversation with high school friends.
- My geographical chronology gets interrupted here and there by trips. Other people’s travels are all over my feed. Feed. This word is weird too. Youtube videos I watch sometimes to numb myself. In minute detail, tales of backpacking travels, van life, surf trip vlogs, japanese food tours. Entertaining. Inspiring? Depressing, kinda. I’m empty from living vicariously.
- Meals. Why do people post their plates? I never really got this. Feeding myself is something that feels too intimate, too personal. My family’s cooking, the huge hangover brunch the morning after with friends, fresh pasta handmade together, in his tshirt my underwear, glass of red, oozing into the kitchen after Sunday afternoon sex. Sacredness of the present moment, shared, real, no desire to post it. No desire to make it virtual. But, then again, I save recipes all the time on instagram.
- Views, gazes on landscapes, urban details that say: I was here, I stood right here, I saw this, me, I did. Leave a trace, not on the place, but marking it on the virtual map. Traces that say, I wandered, I watched, closely, you see. The kind of thing I reblog on tumblr. Poetic, vague, distant, no stakes, or barely. Aesthetic, vain, disengaged.
- Others’ lived experiences. Access to others’ intimacies. Many others. Infinite others. Hunger, or gluttony, of other people’s lives that I’ve “followed” for years. Devouring their content, never feeling satiated, feeling empty, in fact. Just like with the travel content. Vicious comparison. “I’m bad at sharing what I do online; it looks like I don’t do anything. Do I even do anything?” or “everyone must think I don’t do anything”. In reality: I don't think anyone cares, like, at all.
- In the case of a criminal investigation, I was a close friend of the victim’s. Deep dove into her own lived experience, as per the cop’s request. We reread the texts she sent me, the ones where she tels me about being raped. Screenshot. Screenshot. Screenshot. Serially. On and on it goes. “Send me everything, this is very important. Her words in the moment, they’re important.” Hint of guilt as I read my own texts to her: I should’ve insisted more forcefully that she leave, at the time. If I had known, how it would all pan out… Anger, sadness. So gruelling to revisit. I stayed stuck, paralyzed in her life a whole evening, five years after “the facts”.
ARCHIVE OF CONNECTIONS // TO INTERACT
- Archives of relationships, abundant, excessive, everywhere. Hundreds of thousands of direct messages. Millions, maybe. Texts, voice notes, links, photographs, videos. A dizzying amount. And it just keeps on growing.
- Unintentionally encountering a message, while word searching for another. Or even worse, an email. And then, welcome to the memory vortex. Spiraling inferno of nostalgia, or cognitive dissonance, not recognizing myself. Not understanding myself. A forced and abrupt reckoning with the perpetual changing nature of beings, things, situations, oneself.
- Fights. Arguments. Rereading to understand. Scrolling back up, back down. Bumping into them years later; sometimes, realising i was probably kind of wrong, in the end. Or at the very least, that I could have done better. Creeping feelings of shame, embarrassment, disappointment. And then acceptance, understanding for myself: if I react like this now, it must mean that I would do better today, right? right?
- Breakups. Rereading to understand. Scrolling back up, back down. Ruminating obsessively, compulsively, sickeningly. My phone was stolen in a nightclub in a seaside town, I lost all of my Signal chats. The entire archive of my most violent breakup; the before, the after. Months later, I feel how lucky I was that it was all taken from me, without me having a say in the matter. I would’ve never managed to delete all that myself. I’m too sentimental, and grant far too much importance to the archival (well, clearly). “This is a good thing”, had said the reassuring friend who was with me when it happened.
- Archive of flirtations, of texts with “bae” as we said when i was in highschool. Rereading the very budding beginning of a romance. First texts, noticing when the first heart emojis slipped in. An ambiguous sadness, hard to pinpoint, related to everything that has since changed. Being propelled back into the embodied state of being, remembering in a visceral way, what it was like, to wait for that specific text, to receive it, to relish it.
- Cry laughing. Memes. Forwarded tiktoks and Insta reels. Running jokes on group chats. Immense archive of hilariousness. Being thirteen saying “yolo” and “derp”. Saving awkward pics of friends to pull out on their birthdays.
- And twenty more minutes spent reading an argument, between three total strangers in a feminist comment section from some years ago. I love it, I lap it up, it’s compulsive at times. Instagram, youtube, facebook comments. google reviews are the best. Comments to psychoanalyse. Comments as literature. Comments as experimental prose poetry. Dissociative, randomized, blips of voices, societal fragmentation at its most disembodied. I could read them for hours.
- Note: similar effects of the virtual archive as of any personal archive (journals, memory boxes, piles of postcards). But I fall into it so much more frequently, by total accident. Online we have a false impression of ephemerality, of instantaneity. Turns out the traces are everywhere. Sometimes, you bump into them without wanting to, and then comes a choice: engage or not. Unravel the thread or burry it deeper, giving it up the virtual void.