The New York Times Magazine featured, this past Sunday, an intriguing piece entitled "The Web Means the End of Forgetting." Essentially, the article argued that websites have become such efficient storers of data that virtually all users of the internet inevitably leave numerous traces - in the form of blog posts, or Facebook updates, or photographs - of their online activity. And, since there's no easy way for a user to delete a public page that's been archived, that rant that you wrote in June of 2006 or that compromising photo of you at the Phi Epsilon bash may keep coming up in Google searches for... well, for as long as there IS a Google.
As the piece pointed out, this has various consequences. A job interview may take a mortifying turn when the employer studies an interviewee's online footprint. And so the very American conviction that we can constantly reinvent ourselves is giving way, argued that article, to a more venerable mindset in which our actions and mistakes are always, on some level, remembered by the community in which we live.
Such implications are, at the least, concerning, and they do trouble me, as I've been throwing publicly accessible images of Cleo onto the Web now for more than 13 months - without, of course, her consent or understanding. As a student of mine put it once, when we were chatting about blogging during a break, But couldn't she be embarrassed, someday, by your blog?
She could, she could. But are things really as dire as the Times implied? Maybe not. The article mentioned, as a primary example of the consequences of posting personal data, a site called LOL Facebook Moments, which collected examples of, shall we say, indiscrete Facebook pages. Ka-ching, I thought, full of anticipatory Schadenfreude, and went directly to that site. But wait. A visitor to that site now finds nothing but a smiley face and a message: "As of July 11th, 2010, lolfbmoments.com has reached it's end of life." It seems that the Web doesn't quite remember everything. Rather, data on the Web can disappear, as well - and be replaced with nothing but poor spelling.
Certainly, the Internet has changed the way in which many live, and interact. But claims that it represents the end of anything (of reading, of face-to-face conversation, of forgetting...) are still probably overblown. Think, for example, of AOL, which dominated a huge swath of online traffic in the late 1990s. Nowadays, it's more or less... well, forgotten. Websites end as easily, or more easily, than the practices that they threaten to replace. Memory on a lively frontier is not, in fact, very long.
That said, though, I think that I'm not alone in feeling that I want the Web to act as a sort of vicarious memory, as well. One thing that all parents seem to recognize, sooner or later, is that their child grows up quickly, and that the moments spent with a six-month-old, or a two-year-old, or even a grown child, are fleeting. And, once gone, they're hard to recall.
Hence this blog. And not simply so that I can remember, in years to come, what parenting tiny Cleo was like. But to share, as well, so that there is might be sort of small communal memory, by extension. Perhaps it will embarrass, at some point, but perhaps it will also document what was real, and important. And perhaps Cleo might even read it - if, that is, Blogspot doesn't follow the lead of, say, Flooz.com.
And I know I'm not alone in the urge to record what is fleeting, or ephemeral. The alphabet, the camera, the tape recorder: we want to remember. And so we keep trying to perfect systems of memory. Unsatisfied with conventional musical notation, Hector Berlioz once created, I read, an idiosyncratic shorthand , written in layers of light pencil in the margins of his compositions, so that he could record his ideas as quickly as they flew into his head.
As the piece pointed out, this has various consequences. A job interview may take a mortifying turn when the employer studies an interviewee's online footprint. And so the very American conviction that we can constantly reinvent ourselves is giving way, argued that article, to a more venerable mindset in which our actions and mistakes are always, on some level, remembered by the community in which we live.
Such implications are, at the least, concerning, and they do trouble me, as I've been throwing publicly accessible images of Cleo onto the Web now for more than 13 months - without, of course, her consent or understanding. As a student of mine put it once, when we were chatting about blogging during a break, But couldn't she be embarrassed, someday, by your blog?
She could, she could. But are things really as dire as the Times implied? Maybe not. The article mentioned, as a primary example of the consequences of posting personal data, a site called LOL Facebook Moments, which collected examples of, shall we say, indiscrete Facebook pages. Ka-ching, I thought, full of anticipatory Schadenfreude, and went directly to that site. But wait. A visitor to that site now finds nothing but a smiley face and a message: "As of July 11th, 2010, lolfbmoments.com has reached it's end of life." It seems that the Web doesn't quite remember everything. Rather, data on the Web can disappear, as well - and be replaced with nothing but poor spelling.
Certainly, the Internet has changed the way in which many live, and interact. But claims that it represents the end of anything (of reading, of face-to-face conversation, of forgetting...) are still probably overblown. Think, for example, of AOL, which dominated a huge swath of online traffic in the late 1990s. Nowadays, it's more or less... well, forgotten. Websites end as easily, or more easily, than the practices that they threaten to replace. Memory on a lively frontier is not, in fact, very long.
That said, though, I think that I'm not alone in feeling that I want the Web to act as a sort of vicarious memory, as well. One thing that all parents seem to recognize, sooner or later, is that their child grows up quickly, and that the moments spent with a six-month-old, or a two-year-old, or even a grown child, are fleeting. And, once gone, they're hard to recall.
Hence this blog. And not simply so that I can remember, in years to come, what parenting tiny Cleo was like. But to share, as well, so that there is might be sort of small communal memory, by extension. Perhaps it will embarrass, at some point, but perhaps it will also document what was real, and important. And perhaps Cleo might even read it - if, that is, Blogspot doesn't follow the lead of, say, Flooz.com.
And I know I'm not alone in the urge to record what is fleeting, or ephemeral. The alphabet, the camera, the tape recorder: we want to remember. And so we keep trying to perfect systems of memory. Unsatisfied with conventional musical notation, Hector Berlioz once created, I read, an idiosyncratic shorthand , written in layers of light pencil in the margins of his compositions, so that he could record his ideas as quickly as they flew into his head.
But think about it. Berlioz' shorthand was a quirky, personal tactic that was never meant to be public - and yet, due to scholarly interest in the composer, facsimiles of it are available, in most large libraries. His grave in Montmartre, on the other hand, was always meant to be public, and it speaks in a grave, familiar tone of his many accomplishments. His personal record, in other words, lies no more than a few hours' drive from most people. And a public memorial can only be seen in Paris. And yet it's the grave, rather than the revealed personal material, that draws the hordes, and that stands just as it was meant to.
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