The whole strange business of electronic communication is radically changing the way that history will be studied in the future.
No longer will we have the personal and informal letters of the great and good - or at least very few, perhaps the ones consciously addressed to posterity and calculated to display the individual in a positive light. Emails are impermanent, have little life outside your whirring plastic box. Even if saved, how long before your format of choice is obsolete? Apparently a very high percentage of 1960s census data is already lost forever due to an ill advised choice of format - gone before it was ever available for public study.
No more drafts of poetry, prose, laws, philosophies, showing us how masterpieces evolved - they are all wiped once the final version is complete.
The living filigree of internet communication is fragile too - how much of it is saved anywhere? By anyone? What about instant messaging conversations?
All serious food for thought. ("And when my voice ceases to be, will the echoes still ring loudly?".)
All of which is just a way of appealing to people to write to Matt. Go on people, you know you want to. Send him a postcard or a post-it. Brighten his day - (and when he's a high powered business type of the future, you'll be able to remind him and blag a discount : )
Future perfect?
No longer will we have the personal and informal letters of the great and good - or at least very few, perhaps the ones consciously addressed to posterity and calculated to display the individual in a positive light. Emails are impermanent, have little life outside your whirring plastic box. Even if saved, how long before your format of choice is obsolete? Apparently a very high percentage of 1960s census data is already lost forever due to an ill advised choice of format - gone before it was ever available for public study.
No more drafts of poetry, prose, laws, philosophies, showing us how masterpieces evolved - they are all wiped once the final version is complete.
The living filigree of internet communication is fragile too - how much of it is saved anywhere? By anyone? What about instant messaging conversations?
All serious food for thought. ("And when my voice ceases to be, will the echoes still ring loudly?".)
All of which is just a way of appealing to people to write to Matt. Go on people, you know you want to. Send him a postcard or a post-it. Brighten his day - (and when he's a high powered business type of the future, you'll be able to remind him and blag a discount : )