Electronic Ghosts from the Past

Recently, I reset my voicemail password so I could access a function on my phone I hadn’t been able to access for many years, my voicemail. By “many years”, I mean seven years. A millennium in Internet years. When I accessed my voicemail, I was greeted by an electronic voice that proceeded to read out a timestamp on the earliest voicemail. It read “Your message from (---) --- ---- sent Wednesday, September 21, 2008 at 4:31 pm”, then proceeded to play the recorded voicemail. I had voicemail messages from old friends (who were kids at the time), school counselors, people who I have since forgotten, unknown people, and more. Some of the more fascinating, and creepier, messages consisted of unintelligible voices in the background, cloaked in electronic noise. Fortunately enough for my own sanity, the messages ended around the year 2010. I don’t know what happened to the messages that occurred after 2010. Maybe people decided to stop leaving me voicemail since I never got back to them. Anyway, I had around 20 recorded messages stored in my voicemail box. All have been deleted (or were they?). Are they truly gone?

This was an eerie experience to say the least. It was like listening to ghosts from my past, all perfectly recorded, stored, preserved, and transmitted via electronic signal. This incident reminded me of a common phenomenon in the tech world. It’s fairly common for old answering machines and phone lines to operate years after the associated business or organization has gone defunct. If you’re lucky, or not so lucky, you can hear a playback message when you call a number of a no-longer existing organization. The playback message is always creepy, no matter the content. There is a strong association with death, with the message, since the message was once used by a “living” organization. Since the organization is defunct, it’s like hearing a voice from a corpse. Perhaps now you understand why I found my old voicemail messages disturbing, if you didn’t before. Perhaps, too, this blog will go inactive one day and I can visit it again, many years from now, to peek at the works and writings of my past self. Technology will have preserved it all in fine detail. I can only hope that I won’t be too critical of my past writings.

Truly, the majority of people on planet earth have left at least some kind of digital footprint on the Internet. Most people don’t care about these footprints (likely because they don’t think about them). Other people, for various reasons, hope to wash away any footprints they have left. This is next to impossible. Your digital footprints have left behind digital dirt that will remain even after the most intense of scrubbings. It’s almost as if the Law of Conservation applies to data: though data may change its form, it will never cease to exist. My voicemail messages may still exist, in some form or other. Perhaps they are in the “recycle bin” of Verizon’s servers. Perhaps someone else may have kept copies of my voicemail messages. That wouldn’t be surprising, though I can only pity the person who has to sift through my voicemail messages. I don’t even like listening to them.

Is there any information archive more reliable than the Internet and the servers which are its foundation? Even when the power is out, the data lives on in long-term persistent storage. So be mindful of what you put, or where you visit, on the web. Anyone may have enemies and its best to not give your enemies any kind of advantage over you, be mindful for this reason. And be especially mindful for this reason : What you produce will be your legacy, for better or for worse, so be sure you leave a lasting and good legacy.