Not Even a Memory?

Monday, July 24, 2006

This thought is related to the previous posts I have read regarding text messaging cell phones, internet chat and other forms of communicative ephemera, though in the opposite direction. Whereas those topic were about the inanity and lack of value in those forms of communication, I’m writing about that which has value yet is no more likely to last through time.

This is something I noticed a while ago, and thought about while watching some History Channel programs. One of the most valuable tools for later generations to gain insight into what things were truly like back in the time period that they are trying to learn of is nothing less than personal letters.

You see, proclamations, books, great speeches and carved stone tablets are valuable and informative, but they are all, shall I say… less than candid. They are written by people who are at least trying to influence their contemporaries, and at worst they are also spinning their work to provide a certain viewpoint the author wants those in later generations to have of him or her. Granted, even the most heavily spun political speech written by Abe Lincoln was a veritable literary wonder compared to the empty-of-content populist tripe that 99% of modern politicians promulgate.

But it’s the letters written by people alive at the time to each other that really tell you what it was like back in whatever era. From feudal Japan's poets, to Victorian midwives and US Civil War soldiers. And the letters written by famous (or not so famous) literary authors to their friends are worth more to some of us that the actual stories for which they are renowned.

But we are now at a dangerous time in our history. We have stopped writing things down. I don’t mean writing to each other, but actually creating a hardcopy document that captures in a physical medium the thoughts or exchanges between people. E-mails or web posts are not real. They have no physical presence and they can be deleted or worse, altered, by the author or even by completely different people at a later time to manipulate the perception those in the future would have of them. Not to mention they are stored as nothing more than binary bits on magnetic disks, subject to any well timed virus or electromagnetic pulse wiping them out. Even optical storage, though more durable, requires complicated equipment to decode and display, something that can be in issue if there are decades between the time it was stored and the time it will be read. A piece of paper just requires that the person be literate. Even a damaged or partial document is legible, but just a scratch or slight warp on a disk can obliterate everything stored on it.

Because of all that, I propose that we all do something to try and mitigate this potential black hole in history for future generations; print things out.

Now I’m not saying print out your e-mails and weblogs in a massive leather bound volume and sealed in a time capsule that is voided of air and temperature controlled. Hardly any of the historical letters we look at today were stored with any more care than being shoved in a cigar box in someone’s desk drawer.

Even just the act of printing things out, preferably with a date, and storing them in an envelope in a box in the attic is doing something for future historians to get a glance into what we may consider mundane, but to them is a priceless reliquary of our lives.

The only things to keep in mind however is the quality of the hardcopy, both in paper and in the ink used. Much of the cheaper pulp paper and some of the inks used by the dot matrix printers of the 80’s simply don’t last very long even when protected. So it may be best to use decent quality (not exorbitantly priced, mind you) paper for this. I have no idea of the long term potential for perpetuity of your typical HP printer ink/toner.

But it’s worth a small amount of trouble.

And most important, don’t think your not interesting enough for people to care what your thoughts are. The very fact that you aren’t “tainted” by the spectacle of public presence means the opinions you have in many ways carry more weight than those of the loudest voices of our time.

So take a moment and kill some trees. Your great great grandkids will be grateful.