11D 4-ever

~ Laura

In the Winter 2006 issue of Wilson Quarterly, Andrew Stark reports that many bloggers expect to win immortality by blogging.

In the past, immortality was reserved for great warriors or artists. Now, every schmuck can scribble down his thoughts on morning breakfast cereal on his blog, and future generations will find it and think what a clever person he was. Because the Internet never forgets.

Stark interviews Radley Balko who says that the Internet allows people to leave their mark on the world. Another bloggers says, ” I admit to considering the blog’s impact on my immortality.”

Honestly, immortality through this blog never crossed my mind. It’s not like I have many people regularly reading through my archives. Only the errant, perverted google user ends up back there looking for “naked and redhead”.

Question of the Day Do you consider your blog to be part of your legacy?

Published by Laura

19 thoughts on “11D 4-ever”

  1. Nope. Just a way to have some fun and maintain some sanity as an opinionated, overly chatty, non-knitting, non-scrapbooking (feh…), home educating, stay-at-home mother.
    Though from time to time I consider printing out some of the entries to save for the kids to read when they’re older, since I don’t keep a regular journal. That’s about as forever as it gets around here.

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  2. I wonder how many have considered that they may find themselves haunted for the rest of their lives by their miserable blogs? Hmmmm? A careless hack, a sloppy piece of gossip thoughtlessly typed at midnight, a proud moment shared…and later regretted (joining the Communist Party)?
    Immortality is not all it’s cracked up to be. Just ask Prometheus how he feels about it.

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  3. Immortal ? No. Something my children can see what I was like as a person, not just a mom is more like it.
    Plus it’s social for me. It’s hanging out at the watercooler or attending a cocktail party without having to put on mascara and clean clothes.

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  4. Blogging has become the modern day version of a diary for many of us. It’s funny, because I have never kept a diary in my life, in part because I was uncomfortable about the idea of writing things down that someone else might find and read when I didn’t want them to (i.e., a privacy concern). Yet, now I keep a fairly public diary. But I still don’t write about things that I don’t want other people to know about…and I do so pseudonymously…

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  5. I’m trying to process this question alongside the news item a few days ago about CDs you burn at home have a shelf life about about two years. I look at the electronic age and I see impermanace everywhere.
    Do those who seek immortality think that their ISP will be around forever? Do they think their digital picture will last forever, too? What storage medium will hold all this stuff — in perpetuity?!
    Other random thought: only someone a certain age would even think of this question. Isn’t one of our current social worries about teenagers that they are prone to commit things to their blogs without consideration of how long it will stay “out there” in cyberspace?

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  6. Immortality? Hardly. Every time I put up a new post (which is every day), that post pretty much makes all the other posts obsolete.
    I guess if I thought my blog was going to make me famous and immortal, I would have picked a cooler pseudonym. Not sure I want to go through eternity with parentheses in my name.

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  7. Like RCinProv, I doubt our blogs will be particularly immortal. If you want immortality, it is best to commit your thoughts to acid-free paper. Things written for blogs are likely to last a bit longer than, say, things saved in Microsoft Word format.
    I think bloggers are more likely to be looking for temporary fame than for immortality. Not “who will know me in 400 years?” but “where am I in technorati today?”
    Also, even if the internets never forget stuff, the sheer enormity and the ephemeral nature of what’s posted on it would, I think, make it less rather than more likely that any individual blogger will acheive immortality based on their blog entries alone.

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  8. I absolutely do not consider my blog to be part of my legacy. Except- I recently decided to delete all my posts. There were over 1100 of them. I learned that there’s at least one website out there that archives the Internet. So posts that I deleted years ago are still accessible. I found that troubling on many levels. A person can get a tattoo removed, but nothing is ever really deleted from the Internet.
    So maybe even though I don’t consider my blog as part of my legacy, it is anyway. Really, do we get to choose what our legacy is?

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  9. Absolutely not. My blog posts are attempts to say things very much of the moment to people who might be listening, and (I’ll admit) the occasional aide memoire for myself. Our legacies are the ways we treated the people we knew. No-one’s legacy extends beyond the life of the friend or child they knew who outlives them longest. Immortality is for immortals, not us.

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  11. Well, drat, Phantom beat me to it.
    I wonder what the historians think we ought to be doing with our blogs. Archiving them on paper? A good friend of mine is an historian, and it kills her to think of all the historical data lost because it exists only in cyberspace.
    Should the contents of my blog go to wherever I donate my papers after I’m dead?

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  12. Some libraries are archiving blogs. At least, the National Library of Australia archives about 60 Australian blogs, I assume other similar institutions are doing the same.

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  13. For me, the blog is immediate gratification. A chance to purge today’s obsession and amusement. And the opportunity to get feedback pronto.
    If I worried about this lasting forever, I probably wouldn’t write a thing.
    Hubby, the former historian, adds his two cents. He said while he doubted that any one blogger would achieve ever lasting fame from their blog efforts, collectively, blogs are an incredible source of primary source material.

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  14. Walter Winchell. Elbert Hubbard. Albin Barkley. President Elias Boudinot. President Thomas Mifflin. Alice Blackwell. Harriet Blatch. C’mon, there is no immortality. Do well while you are here.

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  15. I suppose something like this concern for a “legacy” is what hampers my own blogging. I really like the idea of participating in either a casual or a polemical way in the blogosphere. The problem is, I’m rarely able to write anything short and pointed; practically every blog post of mine turns into a mini-essay that takes me half the day to write. So maybe some part of my brain resists the transitory quality of blogging; maybe I just keep thinking “what if someone reads this ten years from now?” and that forces me to go on and on to make sure all my bases are covered. Which is too bad, because I really admire the people who can write short stuff well.

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  16. Another great 11D thread! Thanks.
    Not to force the Frey fray into this space, but an article in Slate on the matter raised a point that I’d like to pose in response to the former historian. If journals are as accurate as memoirs, or, better put, if we are all unreliable narrators of a sort, why do historians view them as such a goldmine?
    I can imagine answers — and I was going back and forth on Frey until I got to Mary Karr’s fabulous line in yesterday’s NYT:
    “I fell in love with memoir when I read Helen Keller’s in fourth grade; had it turned out she was merely nearsighted, not deaf, blind and mute, my bubble might have popped.”

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  17. Well I do. Not that I think that I’ve written anything important, but I’d like to think that I might someday accomplish something important with my life (or write something important), and I don’t to have anything I’ve said on the blog come back to haunt me. So I definitely identify with Russell Arben Fox’s issues.
    But I think some caution is generally a good idea with anything you say via electronic media because it can be easily and quickly copied (people always seem to get bitten in the ass when they forget that about e-mail or IM).
    And yes, I backup my blog posts (and my digital photographs too, for that matter).

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  18. loved that Mary Karr quote, too.
    OK, quizzed the former historarian. He said that memoirs and journals have always been unreliable for giving accurate details about the writer’s life. People always gloss over mistakes and glorify accomplishments (unless there is a buck to be made by doing the opposite). Historians use memoirs and, in the future, will use blogs to write social histories, which dont’ look at one person’s life, but to understand the issues and concerns of large groups of people. Little lies won’t matter.

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