encoded notions

Who will keep these works I write? Where will they go when I die? On a long enough timeline, my hosting will expire, my DNS registration will run out, and my content will vanish into the nothingness of the internet’s fleeting past.

Human culture is rapidly expanding into the online world. It is thriving in the ether of networked computers. Millions of people are putting their thoughts, their views, and their lives online in both private and public forms. Commentary and journal entries on blogs. Photos on Flickr. Web-based email storage. Link aggregation on del.icio.us.

Slowly but surely, culture is becoming hyperlinked. But what happens when the content behind these hyperlinks changes? The hyperlinks that tie parts of our new culture together are edited in a way that is reminicent of Orwell’s 1984. The past is not maintained by default like in the physical world. Boxes of photographs, scattered newspapers, pen-and-paper journals, address books. Information stored in the real world is saved by default—even when the maintainer (often the content creator) dies.

When I’m gone, will all of my content still have value to someone or to culture as a whole? If it does, who will maintain it? In a world with a digital culture, what will be our artifacts for future historians to study?

My fear is that we have we entered the neo-Dark Ages where the past is but a fleeting memory and our culture persists as an endless stream disappearing into the past. Once we started relying on computers and networks to interact, we lost contact with the concept of physical decay and the process of aging. Instead an analog time span where things just sorta fade away, we have the almighty delete button. With the press of a button, content can be erased leaving virtually no evidence behind.

Digital media is the essence of instancy. And with that comes impermanence. Here today, gone tomorrow. On-off.

It’s over and I am gone. My undergraduate education is behind me. Four years ago I was in the limbo between high school and college, and now I am in a different kind of interim.

Four years changed me. The experience, the people, the classes, the culture, the environment: they got inside of my head and altered me. I’m a calmer, more understanding person now. I’ve seen people at their best and at their worst. I’ve seen daybreak through the glassy eyes of an all-nighter on too many occasions. I’ve learned more than what my tuition payed the professors to teach me.

I’ve learned what it is like to be a part of something. One among equals. Walking away from this place hurts because I’m walking away from so many good people. I’m heading off to graduate school in Texas and my friends aren’t coming with me. There’s always that online presence, but it’s not the same as being with them. Together you share in the world from a similar perspective. Apart you miss subtleties like the tilt of a head, the energy in a voice, and the animation of a face. These are the things that we miss.

Life isn’t about happiness. Life is about friendship. You are born into a family, but you choose your friends. When you eventually die, the sum of your achievements won’t lie primarily with your family members, but with the dozens of people who you’ve touched in the tiniest of ways.

[I postponed this entry until time had helped to smooth out my thoughts.]