Filling in the digital canvas

One of the things that I love about the internet is that the vast majority still needs to be filled in. It’s like a mostly empty notebook, with the pages in place, but nothing to turn them away from their original blank state. It’s the tabula rasa of the 21st century, at least.

The world of print has been around for centuries, and there are many, many, many books, photos, magazines, post cards, pamphlets, newspapers, and other forms of  materials in that medium. They’re still being created, and will continue to to exist for all time. But over the past two decades or so, the internet has also started to come along. My old handwritten letters to family and friends have probably been lost to history, but the emails that I now send to people will live forever, on some far-off server that I probably don’t know the first thing about.

The Library of Congress is now archiving all of the tweets that have been sent on Twitter. My tweets number in the thousands by now and few, if any, of them are worth being remembered by anyone. And yet, in this digital age that now feels like it’s always been a part of our lives, there they will remain. Newspapers turn yellow with age, but tweets will live forever, for better or for worse.

This blog, and the nearly 700 posts that I’ve written so far, are my contribution toward filling up the great digital canvas. These words and images won’t ever get lost, or thrown into a wastebasket. I’m sharing these parts of my life, in a form that I expect will live for centuries to come. Whether they’re worth preserving or not, I won’t hazard an opinion about. But they will be preserved, at least.

And with that in mind, welcome to my everlasting time capsule!

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