| workin' and thinkin' |
[Jun. 30th, 2008|10:03 am] |
Every day at 8 a.m. I come to the Colorado State University Archives Department and scan old photos for hours on end. The library has thousands of photos, dating back to the university's founding in 1870. They're in the process of uploading the entire collection to a Web site. Here's a random photo I snagged:
Taken in the Horticulture building, October 29, 1938.
Figuring they were about 20 when the photo was taken, that means they were probably born around 1918, which would make them around 90 now. So possibly they're still alive.
But it's a weird thing to realize that most members of my generation (myself included) don't have hard copies of their photos. They're all uploaded to various servers and hard drives, with very few backups or duplicates. Will people my age even be able to look at their own photos when they're 90? Maybe it will be the job of some kid like me in 2078 to recover all the old photos stored on ancient hard drives.
People my age record their own existence better than anyone ever has. There are no records of the day-to-day musings and ramblings and feelings of the members of any society in history. And yet, for all our blogging and Facebooking and Myspaceing and so forth, it's all transient. My earliest messages to Hannah were all deleted when Facebook purged its servers. And yet my parents still have a neatly bundled stack of love notes from when they started dating.
Sometimes I'm tempted to begin the arduous task of printing out all that important stuff, so I'll have permanent hard copies. But I usually get distracted by Wikipedia, and end up reading about fictional frogs or the history of turtlenecks. |
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| Carlin dies at 71. |
[Jun. 22nd, 2008|11:35 pm] |
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Fucking god damn it. I think this is the first time I've been actually upset by a celebrity dying. Linkage. |
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