Oh for sure! With unexpected dividends.
I very consciously have left a digital footprint over the last 36 years online, as best I could, as the internet is my museum and I’m always making some ridiculous thing.
Nearly a year ago, an Italian student in New Media looking for something for his capstone project for his Bachelors, stumbled across my archive of 10,000 Vines on “internet archive” and started looking at other scattered bits of ‘me’ and found me EVERYWHERE.
He sent me a long email in broken English (but not too bad) wanting permission to do a “monograph” of my digital footprint and he’d do it as respectfully as he could. Of course I said “sure!”.
I stayed out of his hair, just a question or two every few weeks.
He ends up with a 96 page coffeetable book after a month of deep research and months of putting it together, even including some more recent Facebook stuff. The boy did an amazing job capturing things I’d have picked if I had the wherewithal to organize my mess of artifacts. I was quite shocked at how astute he was at what he found.
I asked him to remove a few last names from people but that was the extent of my say.
It went before a committee in October ’24 and a month later they accepted it, and he got his Bachelors degree.
Amazing someone collected a bunch of pointlessness but it was nice to be useful.
