Stop Worrying, Your Internet Past Is Not Embarrassing

There's something on the internet that you desperately want to keep everyone from seeing. Something you're deeply embarrassed of. That would show all your friends how you're not actually as smart and fashionable and ironically self-aware as you pretend to be. And you really ought to get over it. We all have stuff like this. Maybe it's a gross Facebook album from college. Or a Xanga or Livejournal or Blogger account, or a dance you did, or an a cappella YouTube video. Or, god forbid, your dating profile. (Thanks again for that, Sam. Dick.) So what's the underlying holdup we have about this stuff? On one hand, yes, yours are the same skeletons everyone else has tried to scrub from the web. But just the same, they leave you feeling impossibly exposed—especially ones where you really tapped into your feelings, like those old personal blog entries. And it's all kind of earnest for the way the internet works now, where you're required to maintain a constant ironic detachment. Which is true. But at some point, all that earnesty really betrays is that you're a human being with human feelings. 

 By Kyle Wagner /Gizmodo/more