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Memory
I was thinking last night, in that twilight before sleep took me, about memory, public memory.
I do a lot of writing and not much if it, anymore, is on paper, and I read a lot, most of it, sadly, not on paper, and I wonder what will happen to it. Will someone figure it is important, this sudden flowering of public discourse (like that which blossomed in the early days of the printing press).
But this flowering is impermanent (not that we have most of what was written as broadsheets). Forget the lack of censors, what I wonder about is the lack of paper. This LJ has a lot of words, and all but a few, live nowhere but on some remote server. I have spiders blocked, so Google hasn’t cached it, and I write most of this on the LJ editor. It has is not, nor has it ever been, recorded anywhere else.
Johnson, Burke, Franklin, Jefferson, Napoleon, both Pitts, Raleigh even so private a man as Wellington all left letters, diaries, written thoughts.
Those who feared the revelations of their minds told loved ones to burn them, when they died. I don’t need to do that. Unless someone has saved the e-mails I sent them, all of it will vanish after I die, for lack of a password I can even keep most of it from needing someone else to burn it… it will just languish until the host decides the account is dead, and “poof!” no more records.
So, I wonder if I should go and print all I’ve written, or just the parts I like, or none, let it lie as it is, for the culture of the net to solve.
I suspect, however, sheer laziness will mean what I’ve already written, save some which was for print, before it was for here, will remain as it is, in limbo… because it’s too much work to go and print it all.
But I will start to write it on my computer, and thus have at least one, slightly more, permanent record.
I do a lot of writing and not much if it, anymore, is on paper, and I read a lot, most of it, sadly, not on paper, and I wonder what will happen to it. Will someone figure it is important, this sudden flowering of public discourse (like that which blossomed in the early days of the printing press).
But this flowering is impermanent (not that we have most of what was written as broadsheets). Forget the lack of censors, what I wonder about is the lack of paper. This LJ has a lot of words, and all but a few, live nowhere but on some remote server. I have spiders blocked, so Google hasn’t cached it, and I write most of this on the LJ editor. It has is not, nor has it ever been, recorded anywhere else.
Johnson, Burke, Franklin, Jefferson, Napoleon, both Pitts, Raleigh even so private a man as Wellington all left letters, diaries, written thoughts.
Those who feared the revelations of their minds told loved ones to burn them, when they died. I don’t need to do that. Unless someone has saved the e-mails I sent them, all of it will vanish after I die, for lack of a password I can even keep most of it from needing someone else to burn it… it will just languish until the host decides the account is dead, and “poof!” no more records.
So, I wonder if I should go and print all I’ve written, or just the parts I like, or none, let it lie as it is, for the culture of the net to solve.
I suspect, however, sheer laziness will mean what I’ve already written, save some which was for print, before it was for here, will remain as it is, in limbo… because it’s too much work to go and print it all.
But I will start to write it on my computer, and thus have at least one, slightly more, permanent record.
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There is a lot I write that never sees the computer screen, and what dose find it's way into the electronic realm, is still held in hard copy in the form of a bound book.
I go through a book about every three months.
Either I am prolific, or my hand writing is big.
Memory (Public & Private)
To be bluntly honest, I don't consider either your prose or your observations, as they appear in your LJ, to be sufficiently superior to mine to warrant full-scale permanent Archival preservation. That applies, as well, to just about everything else I've encountered in LJ and the internet, and of course is solidly subjective. What we're dealing with, I think, is important ephemera; it _is_ important, but it's also ephemeral, in essence.
Still, there would certainly be no harm done if you were to download your archived LJ postings as html documents and save them to a zipdisk or CD, or if -- in your copious free time -- you were to go through those files, select the best & most important stuff, format it as text for small quarto (5.5 X 8 inch) and print out a few copies to be bound into books. (Xerography/laser-printer duplication on acid-free paper seems to be the best option for archival preservation.) If you decide to do something like this, I hope you'll make the text (perhaps in PDF form) available somewhere OnLine, preferably at a site like Bill Burns' <http://efanzines.com> where you can expect at least a few people to download it & print-out hardcopy versions.
Don Fitch
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Re: Memory (Public & Private)
Darwin, for example, had a huge correspondence, which lets us see him as he dealt with people. And his children, his grandchildren (were he not as famous as he became) could look at that and see what their father, grandfather, etc. was like, not just in the glow of memory, but in the light of how he dealt with others, and they with him, and perhaps into bits and pieces he wouldn't have been willing to share with them, in his life.
TK