Personal Sustainability

I am a serial adopter and abandoner of technology. I confess. Blogger, Zotero, Twitter–I have tried them all, employed them with great enthusiasm, and then lost interest. I hadn’t really realized this before today. Now, I find myself here, at Doing Digital History 2016, regretting the data I lost and finally ready to commit. To make a plan.

Today I learned about several tools that will potentially change my relationship to technology as I know it (Tweetdeck and Reclaim Hosting answered questions I had been asking silently for years). The most essential thing that I take away from today, though, is the importance of crafting a more intentional approach to technology. This incorporates but reaches beyond Miriam Posner’s solid advice on creating a web presence to building a more coherent presence for technology in my real life. (This process probably should include assessing why I subconsciously consider my online life “unreal,” but let’s leave that question for tomorrow.)

For right now, the first step forward is to publish this post. I must confess that I am finding it difficult to push that button and make it publicly visible. Is the post too chatty? Have I written something that I will later regret? Does it have insufficient depth? I suppose that progress in the intentional use of digital technology is dependent upon actually using digital technology. Here goes.