I've got a beautiful stack of scanned letters that passed from one person to another all the way from the nineteenth century down to my mother. They're handwritten, in a variety of scrawls. Text meanders tightly down and around the oddly sized pages, filling up every spare bit of the margins in a spiral. Paper was valuable enough that the letter wasn't done so long as blank space remained. There are all sorts of interesting observations, bits and pieces of day to day life: a mention of a doctor doing what he could for cancer, the off hand reference to "the change of life," the descriptions of the journey in a wagon train west, the oddly poetic description therein of looking back as they reached the top of a pass "we could see everything and there was nothing."
Half of what we know about authors and historical figures is derived from their collections of correspondence, volumes stuffed full of their love letters, rants, and confessions of doubt. Even more of what we know about normal people is from such tidbits of correspondence. It's first person history, candid shots of what would become history, written by people who were there who did not know that the spotlight would eventually be upon their words. People who never were asked their opinions, never wrote great works for immortality, their words still echo because a little scrap of paper on which they jotted a note five hundred years ago chanced to survive in a crack between the bricks in a basement. The greatest hole in our knowledge of history is in the every day lives of normal people.
Today's citizens, for all the bemoaning of the death of letter writing, are the most literate citizens in the history of the world. With the electronic revolution, people en masse write more than they have ever written before. Millions of people transcribe their every heart break, professional decision, emotional connection, meal, and political opinion onto blogs and webpages for posterity. Sure, ninety percent of it is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything.
The problem is that so much of it is stored in a terribly vulnerable manner. I don't mean that it is in electronic form, but that it is stored nowhere except the hard drives of private for profit companies. If Facebook goes bankrupt and trashes its hard drives because of privacy laws, we will as a society lose a vast and unedited window into the lives of a certain people at a certain time. With correspondence shifting almost completely to email, there will not be the odd stack of kept letters granting a glimpse into the past. A few computer geeks might have the wherewithal and motivation to backup and archive their emails for decades on end, but the reality is that almost all email in its current incarnation is so much dust in the wind as far as history is concerned, little more resilient to the passage of years than a message shouted across a room.
I do not have a good answer, any solutions that jump to mind merely run into the iron walls of privacy laws, any proposed archives would have to jump through the hoops of getting varied private companies to invest in something for which there would be no profit, or rely on individuals donating their private electronic correspondence. Perhaps some good will come out of Echelon at least, so long as the Feds are archiving away everything that they are reading.
Half of what we know about authors and historical figures is derived from their collections of correspondence, volumes stuffed full of their love letters, rants, and confessions of doubt. Even more of what we know about normal people is from such tidbits of correspondence. It's first person history, candid shots of what would become history, written by people who were there who did not know that the spotlight would eventually be upon their words. People who never were asked their opinions, never wrote great works for immortality, their words still echo because a little scrap of paper on which they jotted a note five hundred years ago chanced to survive in a crack between the bricks in a basement. The greatest hole in our knowledge of history is in the every day lives of normal people.
Today's citizens, for all the bemoaning of the death of letter writing, are the most literate citizens in the history of the world. With the electronic revolution, people en masse write more than they have ever written before. Millions of people transcribe their every heart break, professional decision, emotional connection, meal, and political opinion onto blogs and webpages for posterity. Sure, ninety percent of it is crap, but so is ninety percent of everything.
The problem is that so much of it is stored in a terribly vulnerable manner. I don't mean that it is in electronic form, but that it is stored nowhere except the hard drives of private for profit companies. If Facebook goes bankrupt and trashes its hard drives because of privacy laws, we will as a society lose a vast and unedited window into the lives of a certain people at a certain time. With correspondence shifting almost completely to email, there will not be the odd stack of kept letters granting a glimpse into the past. A few computer geeks might have the wherewithal and motivation to backup and archive their emails for decades on end, but the reality is that almost all email in its current incarnation is so much dust in the wind as far as history is concerned, little more resilient to the passage of years than a message shouted across a room.
I do not have a good answer, any solutions that jump to mind merely run into the iron walls of privacy laws, any proposed archives would have to jump through the hoops of getting varied private companies to invest in something for which there would be no profit, or rely on individuals donating their private electronic correspondence. Perhaps some good will come out of Echelon at least, so long as the Feds are archiving away everything that they are reading.
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