Digital Ghosts

One theory of ghosts, is that they are echo's or psychic snapshots of the past imprinted on the natural world.  But does the digital world also have ghosts?

The other day I was tidying up my deviantART gallery, and on an old submission I came across a comment from a close friend who died a little over a year ago.  I read her comment (and remembered back to when I first read her comment) and noticed that the username was still active., So I clicked their username and followed the link back to their DA page.  It hadn't been touched in over five years, but it gave me a snapshot of their life 5 years ago.  The things they were thinking and the things they liked, posted as favourites and comments.

So it got me thinking, and I started searching her name, and various usernames across the net, and came across various profiles, pages, blogs and comments strewn across the depths of the internet.  Each in its own way a snapshot or snapshots out of time.
Even though her husband had had her Facebook page closed down, I found an older and disused Facebook page.  Each post and share a like a small part of them now gone but preserved digitally.  Like me she refused to Twitter, but how many thoughts are left by so many of us on Twitter and Facebook and other blogging sites?

Who we are is not about the physical.  It's about out expriences, our thoughts, our loves and our hates.  We are the times we share with our friends and the times that we are alone.  Within our presence on the internet we leave so much.  Photos of our likes, our experiences, our times together.  We post about our plans, our past, our regrets.  We tell the world how we're feeling, what we're doing, what we're thinking.  Everything we share and repost, every reaction to our friends posts and the rest of the planets digital trail, show the world what kind of person we are.  Our entire lives are laid bare upon the digial landscape.

Looking back across our virtual life lets us reflect on our real world lives, and when we're gone others can reach out to a part of us held in time.
Like a revenant haunting a forgotten graveyard, our digital ghosts haunt the forgotten recessess of the internet, lost to all but a few that go searching or stumble upon the silent memento mori we've left behind.

For anyone that says they don't believe in ghosts, I say look at the internet, look at your friends held forever in time.

Those who know and care about me might be worried that I'm falling into a morbid or melancholy mood, but I'm feeling surprisingly good, because I know that no one is truly gone anymore.