On Older Posts

Sometimes when I read older posts on this blog I feel like such a tool. The immaturity, the selfishness, the all-too-frequent lack of punctuation and capitalization...sigh. Still, I've kept this journal going for seven years. Seven! It really has become a valuable asset--it reminds me not only of what's gone on in my life, but also of who I've been.

I was reading an article about David McCollough's (author of "1776") recent talk at Fairfield, in which he said that once public figures stop keeping journals, not only do historians lose a vital source of insight into their character, but it also means that those figures are no longer working their thoughts out on paper. That interested me, although I'm not sure that I agree. First of all, I can't imagine that every great public figure of history kept a journal. Napoleon? Really? What would he even need to work out? "To Do: Eliminate enemies, conquer known world, pick up eggs." I think McCollough simply benefited from studying a period of history in which diary-keeping was very much in vogue. I don't think we can assume that everything necessarily goes to hell just because some people prefer not to write everything down.

However, the quote also made me wonder how blogging will fit into the historian's milieu. For one thing, just how permanent is blogging? A physical diary can certainly be damaged or lost, but usually some care is taken to protect it. You really can't do anything to ensure the longevity of content you post online. If Blogger's servers one day failed (although I'm sure there's some kind of complicated back-up system) everything I've written in here for seven years would be gone forever. That's daunting. The same could apply to a public figure who used a blog in place of a diary.

There's also the issue of private versus public blogs. Barack Obama could have a secret blog no one knows about where he gives voice to all those un-politic things he wishes he could say but can't, and it could be a veritable treasure-trove one day to the eager historian looking for a fresh angle on an oft-studied figure, but if no one knew about it, the information would be gone forever. If the privacy settings were on, there's not even the chance someone could stumble over it one day the way people find old letters and Jackson Pollock paintings in their attic.

I guess the question comes down to whether this technology is reliable and durable. Will there still be an internet for us to use in thirty or forty years, or will we have moved on to some unimaginable other? If the internet is still around, will I still be able to access what I wrote here, decades before, or will it have long since become obsolete and disappeared, much in the same way that Sara's and my old Geocities-era webpages have been consigned to the electronic scrap heap?

Even more importantly--will I have any freaking clue what I was talking about in half of these posts? This one, at least, I feel that I can confidently answer...with a no.