
Remembering a relationship, one chat at a time - danso
http://www.good.is/post/chat-history/
======
stevenp
I'm glad to know that I'm not the only one who keeps all that stuff. A few
months ago I went back through some old chat logs to find the first time that
I chatted with my best friend, and it was a lot of fun to relive that part of
my life.

I think people don't realize that the volume of digital artifacts we're
creating is going to be staggering when we look back at them a century from
now. That's one of the reasons I like to check in places. I imagine what it
would have been like if my grandfather had traveled the world with Foursquare
in the 1930s -- maybe I'd be able to visit the pubs where he drank in
Copenhagen, or the port he arrived at when he met my grandmother in Glasgow.

My life might not be that exciting, but I'm definitely leaving a trail behind.
My grandchildren will wonder why I checked in so much at the Palo Alto
Creamery. :)

~~~
sliverstorm
The trouble with saving all your chats is the sheer volume! I used to keep all
my text messages, and log all my IM conversations. Until I realized I had
2,000 text messages on my phone, mostly worthless out of context, and
megabytes and megabytes of IM chats. Unless you triage your conversations
regularly, logging everything just results in a gigantic mess you will never
revisit due to the stunning volume of your archives.

~~~
gerggerg
What about search?

~~~
eru
Especially with search engines becoming better and better.

------
DanielBMarkham
When I go to write a letter, I use some software that allows me to put
together words on a semblance of a page and then print it. The tool is called
a "word processor"

When we live our lives, we leave all these digital footprints and clues all
over the web. It seems to me that somebody should invent a "life processor"
that would collect these traces of our former selves and allow us, after
death, to somehow more actively participate than we've ever done before.

If nothing else, it would be a central repository of things that we left
behind -- words, images, songs, memories, etc. Yes, I know GMail and Facebook
do some of that, but a lot is in chat, on blogs, in comments (like this one),
and spread all over the place. After all, they're _my_ thoughts. Shouldn't my
descendants be able to easily browse and use them? I would think that with a
bit of computational magic, there could be all sorts of new things coming out
of our thoughts after we pass on -- if only there was a central repository of
data to start with.

I liked this article a lot. It reminded me how important the traces of our
digital lives are. Or rather, how important those traces can be.

~~~
corin_
_Shouldn't my descendants be able to easily browse and use them?_

I'm not so sure... there's a lot of things I've written that, looking back a
year or two later, I wish I hadn't, yet alone other people reading them too.

And I'm not talking about the generic big examples that people talk about like
"that picture of you on facebook throwing up" or anything, just small things,
whether it's an MSN conversation where I over-reacted and acted like a
complete dick, flirting with someone on MSN in what is later obviously a
really embarassing way, or that time I told my friend that my
mum/child/brother was boring/annoying/whatever me.

And of course secrets, whether they're ones I want to keep from certain
people, or something private that I don't want anyone knowing, but for some
reason wrote about in a not-for-public-eyes personal diary sort of way.

I don't know how much there is that I don't want other people seeing, but I
know I've seen old stuff I've written/said/done/made that I cringe at now, and
I'm sure there's plenty more that I just haven't noticed.

~~~
danso
I've thought that. But when I look at those things _5 years later_ , I realize
that it all wasn't such a big deal, and I kind of cherish the ability to see
how I thought back then (sometimes I'm more ashamed at how little has changed
in 5 years as far as my thought-process and writing style goes).

------
3am
I feel badly for the author, not just for her loss. It seems a little cruel to
be denied the therapeutic fading of memories over time (just as a natural part
of the grieving process and recovery). I hope that we develop some cultural
norms as dying and leaving behind a digital presence becomes more common.

~~~
dailyrorschach
I don't know about that. People keep home movies, pictures, etc. Likely over-
time she may check them less and less, probably does so already. Maybe only
checking on certain days or holidays. I don't think it's that strange, plenty
of people keep reminders of loved one's lost without crippling themselves.

~~~
3am
It's just that she mentioned that his contact was just below her best friend.
From there it's just one click to have access to years of correspondence. And
it's particularly difficult to consider deleting contacts or calendar
reminders for love ones who have passed, so this is presented to her on a
regular basis (not just when she wants to remember him, like one would do with
home movies/photographs/etc).

I don't think it's crippling, it just makes the process of moving on a little
longer and more difficult.

~~~
joeyh
Yes, the thing to do would be to archive it, and then delete the contact.
Similar to taking the love letters out of the desk drawer and moving them up
to a trunk in the attic.

Also has the added benefit of not being dependent on gmail retaining the logs.
This needs to be made easier and encouraged.

------
swhitt
Holy crap. Normally stories like this don't affect me very much. I'm on my
lunch break, on the verge of sobbing. Is somebody cutting onions?

Part of me wants to delete all of my chat logs so that I can never relive this
stuff if something were to happen to my SO. But then I'd lose all of that, and
the thought of losing those memories is terrifying.

~~~
rocktronica
Same reaction here.

Actually made me remove a filter I had to trash all chats. Saving, resources
allowing, from here on out.

------
ethank
I don't delete any data, and in fact on my Drobo and RAID on our home server I
have files going back to Jr. High.

I often look at how my parents remember things, like my dad remembering his
now deceased parents and realize that memory for me is going to be
fundamentally different.

For one: they have a memory dictated by the physical effects of chronology.
Their photographs and videos age. Mine age only when subject to progress of
technology and arbitrary concepts that are based on representation (i.e.,
datestamps).

My memories live outside of time now. Ten years ago is morphologically no
different than yesterday. The only fundamental fissure with chronology is file
formats, but even that isn't insurmountable.

My wife and I first emailing, our first date, my child's birth, our wedding:
all there in a Spotlight index and on redundant drives.

The memories of my great grandpa, my wife's grandmother: all there.

The thing is: does this stop? I've taken 2900 photos of my son so far (in two
years). When do we live so fully outside of time that we lose our concept of
it passing? We can live without letting go with so little consequence, just
the addition of drives, that its silly not to try.

In ten years, I'll have accumulated exponentially more data than in the ten
years, or twenty years prior. I don't yet know if that's a good thing.

------
bcrescimanno
A very sad story; and I'm sure she's not a unique case in her behaviors around
her husband's death. I cannot imagine how I would cope with losing my wife
(and frankly, I don't want to)--but I suspect I might spend time looking at
old chats and emails as well.

While I know it's not the focus of the article, I hope the article also serves
as a reminder to HN readers like myself who "carry the ginger gene" to pay
attention to your skin, and get screened by a dermatologist regularly.
Melanoma, like most forms of cancer, is easiest to beat when caught early.

------
rayiner
My girlfriend and I weren't living in the same city when met, so we started
our relationship over gchat and text message. We're both pretty glued to our
iPhones, so large parts of our relationship are chronicled in digital form. We
sometimes find ourselves resolving the "honey I definitely said that" tiffs of
daily life with a quick search of our chat logs.

The internet is often accused of putting barriers between couples, but this
article gives a sweet example of how it can contribute to relationships as
well.

------
throwaway122321
I met my Girlfriend at the library of our school. We didn't exchange names or
anything really when we first me, but the printer kiosks in the library
require you to authenticate with your school IDs. Our school email addresses
are our <ID>@<schoolname>.edu

When I was talking to her the first time, I noticed her ID (or something
close, I had to try a few variations actually) and I emailed her later that
night. She didn't think I was being creepy, although I probably was.

We've been dating a long time now, but sometimes we'll go back and look at our
first real conversation which happened to be online via email. It's kind of
special to me and her to have a record of this meeting.

I love having this ability to re-read old conversations.

~~~
joejohnson
That's a great story.

------
raldi
That's really touching.

In a happier version of this, I was at a wedding rehearsal dinner where the
bridesmaids got up and read a similar narrative, stitched together from their
own chat histories with the bride.

It went from "I met someone last night! :)" to "I'm excited about our date" to
"I think things are getting serious" to "Oooh I'm so pissed at him right now"
to "We got engaged!"

~~~
sgentle
I think about things like this sometimes when I hear people say they want to
change the world. What they mean is that they want to change the world in a
way that they can imagine, but the law of unintended consequences won't let
you off that easy.

Was some Google engineer thinking in 2005, "implementing chat logging in GMail
is going to change the world!" I doubt it, but for these people it is a
changed world. What looks from one angle like appending lines to a table
somewhere, from another looks like your own personal biographer taking
snapshots frozen in time.

~~~
ethank
I have a discussion board that I've run for over ten years. While I'm not as
invested in running it anymore, the reason I keep it online and active and
maintained is because it contains within it the narrative histories of a group
of people. These histories have ended up in marriages, babies, deaths and
friendships.

I think people don't often consider text on screen to be as meaningful as it
is.

------
ctide
We are building a service specifically to track this sort of thing. It's an
open source project here: <https://github.com/lockerproject/locker>

If you're interested in ways to track and parse through all the types of data
that you're producing, take a look! We're probably about a month away from a
hosted offering, but you can pull down the source and run it yourself today.

~~~
kragen
I think Locker is an _extremely_ interesting project. As I understand it, it's
a big step in the direction of decentralization: a practical way to keep the
data that's important to you under your own control, not under the control of
some company that's not accountable to you, one of the themes I touched on in
"Why I do not want to work at Google".

So I want to encourage everyone else to look at this.

------
mparr4
That was incredibly beautiful and arresting. Thank you for sharing.

------
badclient
gchat's chat is one of the most useful feature ever. It is absolutely
unforgiveable why such hyped up and high-usage clients like skype do not let
you record chat conversations and make them searchable online.

------
jtchang
So sad. When are we curing cancer again? :(

~~~
thaumaturgy
"We"? I'm not working on it. Are you?

~~~
cooperadymas
I presume he meant "we", as in a broader sense of a collective society.

Regardless, you don't have to be directly working on it to help the cause.
There are thousands of ways to donate money toward cancer research. Thus, if
cancer were to be cured I think some credit would go to the larger body of
people who have supported the research throughout the years. So, yes, "we"
would be curing cancer.

------
kragen
I hope she's keeping backups somewhere outside the cloud.

------
mike-cardwell
I don't see the point in hoarding this sort of data. I mean, I can see the
sentimental value, but I think the disadvantages of having to manage that data
and the risk of it being leaked outweigh it.

I delete my email after I've dealt with it, and I regularly delete my IM chat
logs.

------
nobuff
Wondering is there any service that takes care of your personal domain name
after you have gone?

------
tuhin
Some of you might enjoy this TED talk abut last status update:
[http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status...](http://www.ted.com/talks/adam_ostrow_after_your_final_status_update.html)

------
suking
Jesus that was sad.

~~~
muyuu
Got something in my eye reading that...

My health isn't stellar right now. Makes me think about the conversations I'm
having now with my woman. Off I go to say something sweet...

------
Hisoka
Sentimental story, but at some point keeping memories of the past can be too
painful. Better to try and forget and move on with life. Keeping in touch with
the past helps for a short period, and can be therapeutic, but after awhile,
it can be distracting and keep you from moving on.

------
tonio09
Cancer is terrible. this is a beautifully emotional heart breaking story.
something i would expect on the front page of reddit. But what the heck does
it do on my Hacker News with 350 upvotes?? Get off my lawn!

------
rhygar
We owe it to the dead to keep on living. For people like this, I say: "move on
and stop living in the past". Life goes on and must go on.

~~~
_phred
It's part of the grieving process, a process that takes a long, long time. Let
people grieve as they will.

