Some time ago I deleted my social media accounts and only kept this blog and my YouTube channel. Since then, I won’t lie, I have been thinking about starting them up again because I miss knowing what’s going on with my ex-network.

What stops me restarting them is soon after, I am overcome with boredom and tediousness of the idea that I don’t need to waste my time on them. Besides, I’ve done well without them so far that they offer me absolutely nothing other than wasting my time on them.

I don’t think I would have read War and Peace and finished reading another 50 or so novels (most of them classics and Russian literature 🤣) otherwise. So there, that’s a win for me.

Anyway that was the “old me” and I’m quite happy and content with the “new me” being oblivious to what’s happening in the workspace.

Recently I met someone who is in the process of erasing their digital footprint. It was fascinating to learn what they are doing to get off Google, social media sites, email lists, and all mention of their work and photos on Google searches.

In effect, they want to be like they never existed.

The reason for this is that they are highly technically adept and have been participating on the social web for years but now, as they have a growing family, they not only want their privacy but they want to control the information that they give out as well as see about themselves online.

They understand that this takes a HUGE sacrifice of time and it’s an ongoing process. They say they’ve already spent two years slowly erasing their digital footprint and even paid for a service to do some of it on their behalf. They have their own personal cloud as well opting out of services like Google. They’ve deleted all social media accounts except for LinkedIn as they still need this for their work and assure me that it will be deleted when they retire. LinkedIn has been locked into a static page of just their CV, unfollowed everyone.

This is what I did with mine some years back and I wrote about it here being the most popular article on my blog site but in the end, my current profile is now archived – not dead yet – as I’ve decided I don’t want to ever work in a professional capacity in the fields of business learning and development or technology or building social and community programs for big business anymore.

Learning about how this person is undergoing digital erasure made me think about how people are now questioning their online behaviours. It’s like they’ve woken up from some kind of slumber realising just how much their actions and behaviours have entrenched them into a system that constantly bombards them to buy stuff.

I know that it’s a sacrifice to completely erase oneself online (others call it madness) because the ENTIRE WORLD IS ONLINE and being the one who sits “outside the matrix” is seen as the luddite or the freak.

It’s a struggle to be in a world where people around you seem to be in the same conversations, seen the meme or the same cat videos but really, none of that really matters.

I think my greatest lesson sitting outside it now is how little most of it matters in the end. So I’ve got all my work, my projects, my words, my photos online for everyone to see and access but so what?

When I Google myself, it’s like I’m googling a stranger. It’s me – yet it’s not me now.

The real me is the person that only my family and close friends know. Or in my hand written journals I’ve been writing since I was 15.

And none of that me is online.

………..

Some years back I wrote a post here called Building a Digital Profile. My, how far I’ve come….🤣

Building a Digital Profile