At age 64 I belong to the historically unique group of people who have one foot of their lives squarely within the digital era and one foot squarely outside it...right now there are a lot of us, but like the almost extinct group of folks who experienced World War II, there will be a time when we're all gone and everyone alive will have the span of their chronological lives covered by computer technology and the Internet. How does my life in this respect differ from my younger friends and the generations preceding me? Let me explain about this great information chasm...
A few days ago I subscribed to an online service displaying old newspapers from years gone by, as they appeared in print. Among these papers was the local Ft. Lauderdale rag, and it covered the years I went to school there and a few thereafter. Just browsing through them I would occasionally see a picture or article with a familiar name from school...one who made repeat appearances was Jim, whom I knew very well for 11 years from the 2nd through 12th grades as we were in the same year in school and grew up living close to each other. I already knew he had tragically passed away from complications relating to cancer in 1998 and that he had developed a penchant and talent for poetry in his adult life. On the tribute website for him was mention of a book containing some of his poems. I went to Amazon and Google and there is not a trace of its title and very little if anything about this remarkable man. Yet he only left this Earth 22 years ago, but it might as well have been 220 since his work was largely done before mass digitalization revolutionized communications. Contrast that with this blog of mine, a daily journal of general interests begun in 2007: you can easily find it on a Google search, but only because it's on this side of the great digital divide. And that's what I'm discovering with my perusals of the old newspapers: these people I went to school with and closely knew...some in friendship and regrettably some in enmity...seemed to have suddenly just fallen off the planet. The advent of Facebook did perform a service in that several "resurfaced" from the anonymity that assimilation into the masses and the march of the years had placed them under, and I respectfully recognize that probably many people wish to remain there. Ol' Jimbo, I'm confident, would have loved the opportunities that social media gives us today to reconnect...but the information chasm has now left his significant voice largely and sadly on the other side...
People in my generation, like me, can develop an ongoing digital history of ourselves but it only naturally extends to the edges of the advent of digitalization...to go beyond further back in time requires special efforts such as digitalization of old pictures and, in my case, taking advantage of old newspapers online and blogging while recounting old memories. Life is now openly being reported and recorded on a daily basis...and it all remains in the great digital cloud...while life before this era, as it retreats further and further into the past, becomes exponentially more of a mystery shrouded in uncertainty with its evidence stored away in boxes in dusty rooms. I wonder whether at some point, probably later this century, people will look back at the transformation of the 20th into the 21st century as a kind of cliff beyond which information drastically drops off. Maybe today is the time to try to salvage some of it while some of us who were there can remember it. I like the successful efforts to digitalize old music recorded before CDs, but with literature we're way, way behind on reaching the same level of progress. I wonder if anyone knows where I can get a copy of Arrival: One or Only?...
