Ghosts in the Machine

Whilst searching for an old email that I needed to recover I came across several others from two friends who have died in the last year. There are ghosts in my computer. Unsurprisingly it was a bitter-sweet experience: memories of times and tasks shared, in one case shot through with a stab of laughter seeing again the words of one who was infamously witty and wicked in her on line correspondence. I paused – just what is the “etiquette” about keeping or deleting mail from lost friends? Are emails like letters, to be held as a treasured keepsake, or should they be discarded as nothing more than a memo, a fleeting moment unworthy of being held as a true memento?

This strangely mixed moment raises real issues about who we are and the footprint of our lives in this digital age when so much of what we do is recorded. A hundred years ago what physical trace would we “ordinary” people leave behind us? Birth, marriage and death certificates, a handful of letters, perhaps a will and some sticks of furniture for our children if they were lucky. Today all my financial dealings, all my correspondence, most of my work and a large part of my life are recorded somewhere on computers or cameras. There are photographs and videos, sound recordings and filing cabinets, all full of bits of me. Does this effect who I am or not? Some contemporary social thinkers would insist that I am creating my own “identity” out of this scrapbook of choices and chances.

It was once said of the rather vain Benjamin Disraeli that he was “a self made man who adores his maker”. I’ve always thought of myself as a half-made human, a collaborative work in progress with the real me still emerging out of the ongoing conversation with God which we call “life”. Mostly I detest the idea that all these people are holding so much information about me, but in some ways it serves to show that I really am not “self made” - I only exist in a whole network of relationships and responsibilities to others. What I need to sort out is which of these relationships and which of these records really matter to me - which of these threads of conversation are significant in the tangled web which joins me to the God who is the centre of all things truly real?