Blogging for the Future

This week's assignment, to create something for the Yahoo Time Capsule project, I must say I was not too excited about. Most of the time capsule submissions I looked at at the site were not very different from heading to heading (Beauty, Hope, Anger, etc.), and nearly all reminded me of signatures in a high school yearbook. "Shout out to my man Jerome." (I totally made that up)... "I love my kids." "Out for drinks with my best friend." Ok so none of these were not actual submissions, but they do give you their flavor.

I don't disapprove in any way, it's just not something I feel compelled to join in on. (Maybe for Jerome's sake?...) Anyway, I had no idea what to do, except to take more pictures. I ended up using some obvious, easy choices for "slices of life" in my world. One was an altered picture of the view outside my living room window, from which I can see two American flags. (One of them is enormous, outside of the Discount Flooring Supermart Outlet near the highway, which you can also see from my window.) The other pictures I used were of my cat. Then it seemed really lame, so I wrote a few lines to incorporate some text, and made a brief statement about the flag and about being an American. Very short and simple, and inevitably political. You can see the result here:

Time Capsule 2006

I spent most of my time the last couple days preparing for a tutorial my team has to give in class tomorrow on using the Fireworks software we've been learning to create some of the fancier effects in these last couple assignments, so I confess I just wanted to get this done. It came out ok though.

I came across a different yet similar project just this week, in a library blog.

(I've been trying to add more blogs to my blogroll in the sidebar...and incidentally I changed templates for this blog because the other one was not displaying well in Internet Explorer -- the sidebar was showing up at the very bottom of the blog, after the last post. I don't like this one as well stylistically, but it gives more room for pictures....)

I will try to find the link in a minute, but it was a British project asking people over there to blog about their day "a day in the life of Britain" or something.

Here is a BBC News story about it. It's called One Day in History, and its being called the "biggest blog in history." October 17 was the day, but they're still accepting submissions. They seem to just want "Britons" for it though. Sponsored by the History Matters campaign.

One thing interesting about this stuff for me is that we've been reading in my archives and manuscripts class about archiving policies and procedures (theory). In the 80s and 90s they developed an approach called Documentation Strategy which involved collaborating between many organizations to decide what ought to be preserved and then figuring out how to do it. With electronic media, issues of preservation have a whole new kettle of fish to clean.

Will my blog be available to historians in the 22nd century? Will they care to read it if it is? (Will they have time? If every 5th person alive between now and then writes a blog once a week, how many gigabytes or terabytes of storage will be needed per year to update and maintain it over the next century, taken into account the population growth which we've been warned about again recently?)

Here's a pertinent quote from the BBC article about the "Blog of Britain" I mentioned above:

The wonderful thing about these records is we don't yet know what it is about them that will be interesting in the future.

It may be that historians in the future will be amazed that on 17 October 2006 we were still eating meat or driving privately owned cars.

Or maybe they'll be amazed that someone thought a blog was good place to store information -- if they have the time...

How many cable channels, chill from his rippling rest,
The bloggers wings shall dip and pivot him,
Shedding white rings of malware, posting high
Over the spammed bay waters Liberty--

Sorry, that was a bit of farcical parody. Hart Crane deserves better. The beauty of his own lines will not mind this inconsequential misappropriation. Read the original, To Brooklyn Bridge, immediately if you haven't heard of it before! It's about a seagull, not a blogger, silly. But really, how many cable channels will there be in 2106, and will the historians really care what we were blogging about back now-a-days? I guess a historian would...

Well, that was a bit of a ramble. I'll post some pictures like a good photo blogger in the next post.