Joshua Foer Quotes

We're all creating an archive of our own lives, whether we're aware of it or not.

I'm not big on looking up myself. I don't get Google alerts, and I don't look on blogs.

Most of us still haven't grasped the fact that everything we commit to the digital space - not just our public blogs and broadcast tweets, but every private text message, email, and voicemail is likely to be stored and accessible. Forever.

Creating a representation of yourself for the Internet stopped making sense when we were all on phones and connected everywhere.

I'm a person who always wanted to turn my life into an archive. Social media made my dream come true.

People should think about e-mail as something where they are archiving their lives.

Sadly, it seems as if there is no longer any real history. Just momentary reactions to events that disappear like sky-writing with items like Twitter, texts, Meerkat, Snapchat, and Instagram.

Media cycles end, but the Internet never forgets. This is a valuable lesson, especially for college students.

When I was growing up, my mother would always say, 'It will go on your permanent record.' There was no 'permanent record.' If there were a 'permanent record,' I'd never be able to be a lawyer. I was such a bum in elementary school and high school... There is a permanent record today, and it's called the Internet.

When you die, nobody pays your hosting company, and your work disappears. Like that.

And if you get caught up in combing the Internet for what people think of you or how people perceive you, I think that's a slippery slope.

I've never Googled myself on the Internet.

There's no first impressions anymore. You go to a job interview, and they'll probably Google you. It's a shame - people should play it a little closer to the chest as far as what information they release to the world. If I'm angry about something, I'm not going to take to my Twitter.

I swear on everything holy I do not know what's on the Internet about me.

Most days I am in public. If I go to the store, with social media, I'm in public. It might as well be a press conference.

I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.

I have a private Instagram and an official one, so I'm not opposed to social media.

I never ever Google myself. That way madness lies.

Digital media are biased toward replication and storage. Our digital photos practically upload and post themselves on Facebook, and our most deleted e-mails tend to resurface when we least expect it. Yes, everything you do in the digital realm may as well be broadcast on prime-time television and chiseled on the side of the Parthenon.

TheIinternet is a timeless void - you put something in there, and it's there forever and loses a lot of context.

As kids, we say stupid things, and because there's not a record of it, nobody is going to give you a hard time at 30 years old about something you said or did when you were 8 years old. Online, you have all these social networks that are moving to a state of persistent identity, and in turn, we're sacrificing the ability to be youthful.

Gone are the days when your indiscretions at university were recorded in a roneoed college newsletter of which there is only one copy left tucked in a filing cabinet at the back of a library. Today that same college newsletter is online, accessible by the whole world now and forever.

Never have lives less lived been more chronicled.

Everyone self-Googles. And, I have, of course, the Google alert.

It's very rare that things are true about yourself that are on the Internet. It's just sad sometimes. So you definitely try and stay away from it as much as possible.