We’re locked out of old versions of ourselves. But, faced with ever-changing terms and conditions, many of us don’t know where our data goes, how it’s used, what is kept and what isn’t. I wish I could access my first email account or old ICQ chat and see a glimpse of who I was online then. The recovery method for my old Yahoo! account is my university email, which I cannot remember, and a burner-phone number that I deactivated a decade ago. It’s a history almost impossible to access.

What is the status – and legacy – of that abandoned content?Ĭommissioned illustration by Anna Haifisch, 2022 There’s the extremely personal Tumblr my friend kept when she was a teenager that she can’t delete the youthful artworks that other friends lost when they failed to update passwords, or after hosting services like Kodak Gallery and Photobucket changed hands. Somewhere online is a photo of me, aged sixteen, on the day I met my first boyfriend at a concert: a friend snapped photos when we were getting ready and posted them on Picasa I haven’t seen them since. No one says ‘blog’ anymore, much less considers their TikToks a form of vlogging and no one thinks of their Instagram as a ‘photo album’ like they did on Picasa, even if these are descendants of Web 2.0.īut the internet desert does not document the genealogy of our online activity rather, it’s a place of loss: forgotten passwords and abandoned communities, old content we can no longer access, versions of ourselves we gave up. Then, they saw these platforms shift: Facebook timelines became confusing and dull, optimised for advertisers rather than users blogs became professional and theirs started to seem a bit embarrassing. They shared holiday snaps on Picasa, posted videos to YouTube and opened Facebook accounts. Mid-2000s internet users were encouraged to start blogs on platforms like Blogger and keep journals on the likes of LiveJournal.

The emphasis in the late 1990s and early 2000s on participation online – users posting content rather than only consuming it – was revolutionary and short-termist at once. Web 2.0, the promise of a new way of being online, created a desert on the internet: a place where content is posted and forgotten, but never goes away.

How to recover an old icq number