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Archive for July, 2007

Marian talking about her first day on her new job

“We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness – That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such Form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” – A bunch of scary subversives, July 4th, 1776

I wonder what Thomas Jefferson would have thought of the Internet and F-16′s flying combat air patrol above the cities of his beloved republic on the 4th of July. My hunch is that he would be fascinated by both although saddened and puzzled by the terrorist threat implicit in the CAP’s. I also suspect that he would be outraged by the so-called “USA Patriot Act” (USA Big Brother Act).

It was Jefferson who said, “I prefer the dreams of the future to the memories of the past,” and I suppose that the eternal optimist would say the same thing if he were here to speak for himself today, but also, I would guess that he would strongly urge us to remember – to remember who we are, where we came from, and the principles of liberty which have guided us for these 230 years.

“Time indeed changes manners and notions, and so far we must expect institutions to bend to them. But time produces also corruption of principles, and against this it is the duty of good citizens to be ever on the watch, and if the gangrene is to prevail at last, let the day be kept off as long as possible.” – Thomas Jefferson to Spencer Roane, 1821.

Jefferson often worried about corruption of the revolutionary spirit, and of course, he was right about that too. He knew that the energy which had pulled us together as a nation, against all odds, was our passionate commitment to liberty, the unalienable rights of the individual, and the dream of a nation where everyone stood on equal footing in the eyes of the law. Bereft of this driving passion we would be lost. He knew that comfort, convenience and complacency would conspire against the raw passion of the Revolution to drag us back toward slavery.

“I will not believe our labors are lost. I shall not die without a hope that light and liberty are on steady advance.” –Thomas Jefferson to John Adams, 1821.

If there be such a thing as ghosts, I hope the ghosts of the patriots walk our streets tonight. I can smell the smoke of gunpowder and hear the crackle of their musket fire a few city blocks away. I hope they keep us fathers and mothers awake tonight and whisper into the ears of our sleeping children of the lives they gave for the freedom that we seem so ready to trade for a cheap illusion of security.

“They that would give up essential liberty for a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” – Ben Franklin

I hope those old patriots bother us mightily tonight.

The impact of the digital revolution on the preservation of personal history

My mother still has all of the letters that my grandfather penned to my grandmother while he was in France during WW1. We have the photos, although some of them are beginning to deteriorate. Years ago, when I was still doing darkroom, I re-photographed and printed the collection of ancient family pictures. Those are stored in archival sleeves in a binder and are holding up pretty well. The best CD-ROM’s are said to be good for 100 years, maybe. DVD’s are thought to be good for about 30 years. I have many photos, audio tapes, and paper written journal entries older than 30 years, and some photos older than 100 years. That’s only 1907 today.

The digital revolution has been a tremendous benefit to the production and broadcasting of information. It’s so easy and affordable that anyone can do it. But it has also made our personal history ephemeral and transitory. As long as the blog stays up, it’s there. Until the hard drive crashes or the disks become obsolete, the material is stored and preserved, but it can all vanish in the blink of an LED. Also, the sheer volume of digital information has the effect of diffusing the significance of our self-produced media. No one can get near to wading through it all. It may require some sort of super computer with artificial intelligence to sift through it all and determine patterns and themes, and I would be suspicious of the results drawn from any robot. Artificial intelligence would probably not be able to recognize genuine genius.

Long ago, in a universe far, far away, if I wanted to write something, I had to get out a sheet of paper, roll it into the platen of my typewriter and whack away at the keys until I got something. If I screwed up or decided my wording was clumsy, I had to retype it. Sometimes several iterations were done before I got it the way I wanted it. Today, with a couple of mouse clicks, my word processor is open and catching my pearls of wisdom, even automatically correcting my spelling as I go. With a couple more mouse clicks, my thoughts are on the web where millions of people can read them if they so choose. If I wanted to publish my writings before the Internet, I had to send copies of the manuscripts via US Mail to magazines or publish them myself and mail them around. This was expensive and slow, and the return on investment was terrible. Today, a pajama-clad blogger can go toe-to-toe with the New York Times. Amazing. Conversely, none of my typewritten manuscripts have ever suffered a disk or file corruption error. They are all resting peacefully in my filing cabinet. If nothing disturbs them, they will be there for the next three hundred years.

Every newspaper in the world is obsolete today as a news medium, but we still buy them. Is it because we like to hold something in our hands? Do we trust it more? How will subsequent generations understand us? What will be the artifact? Will we demand that they sift through gazillions of tera-mega-giggle-googlebytes of meaningless crap to try to figure out what our experience was? Or will some sort of filter come into play by necessity, forced by the sheer enormity of the digital record?

So, I’m conflicted and concerned about the digital revolution. On one hand, it makes so much possible, and dissemination is so much more economical. Our media travels at the speed of light. On the other hand, the stuff we are producing is ephemeral and transient. The diffusion and multiplicity has a way of discounting the product. Our media is cut loose from place and time much more than ever before.

As we bask in the luxury of the digital age, we must ask how our personal histories will be carried forward in time. How will the future understand us?

On Memory:

“Nothing that has been deposited in the memory is lost. Memory is a computer that all one’s life goes on accumulating data which are not always used, since man is often like an ocean liner that sets sail with only a single cabin occupied. We ought to be able to use this huge accumulation of data continually, keep it functioning, combine and multiply its elements and reintroduce them into the circuit of our thoughts….Maybe I’ll have the good fortune to find again other things that now seem forgotten. I’d like to be able to go back and see all the things that at the time I stored away without perceiving them, follow myself at the age of ten and judge, with the mind of today, the conditions under which I lived, thus discovering what, at that time, had been deposited in the computer without my knowing it.” Source