Email: not.waving@but.drowning.co.uk
May 11th, 2007 by Eats Wombats
Can there be any doubt that email as we know it is headed for the dustbin of history? The British Library is seeking to take a snapshot of it this month for future historians. The animated, slightly kaleidoscopic graphic at the project website features the recently mentioned London Gherkin, and some other icons of British life: Big Ben, the Beatles, John Cleese, a Dalek, and Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North.
My sympathies are with this artist, who built a machine that literally shredded spam. And I wonder if the BL project isn’t just a little bit daft (Microsoft is sponsoring it), though it is redeemed a little by the solicitation of meaningful email. Pity the poor biographers of the future who will find the hard disks of their subjects discarded, broken or, like the juicier bits of Pepys diaries, encrypted. Despite Google and Brewster Kahle’s slightly spooky Wayback Machine digital information is all too mortal. I heard him say at a meeting we attended in Japan: “I don’t know who the President of the US will be in 2045, but I do know that we’ll have archived the first web page she created when she was still in high school” — a prospect I found rather sad. Others feel the same now. It’s perverse, this business of remembering stuff we’d prefer forgotten and vice versa.
Periodically, I Google “Fanny Puppink” to see if a story that I had archived on a floppy disk that died, which I stupidly took to the tropics (with predictable results), should ever turn up on the web. It hasn’t and I now suspect it never will.
It was a wonderfully romantic story of international collaboration using electronic conferencing, back in the days of Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) and VAXnotes, in the mid 1980s. It unfolded as a series of messages posted on one of DEC’s internal bulletin boards accessible to tens of thousands of staff worldwide. An American engineer met a French girl on holiday Ireland but didn’t realize she might be the love of his life until he got home. All he could remember was her name, that she was a law student and one other two other not very helpful details. Could anybody help track her down?
French colleagues in Ferney Voltaire got out their phone books, emails were sent, calls were made, reports back given as the wrong Puppinks were eliminated one by one and the trail grew warmer and warmer. It went on for a couple of weeks, with more people joining in around the world to cheer for love, or commenting on how they couldn’t stand the excitement as the conclusion drew near. All we knew at the end was that the connection was made.
This heartwarming story of the shrinking but still innocent world is now gone, alas. But not entirely. It’ll be recorded on the Wayback Machine shortly after I post it here. Maybe I’ll email this to the British Library.
It was only 20 years ago or so. Nobody had broadband or any kind of Internet. Being able to tap a global community, electronically, for any reason, gave one a feeling of having access to a parallel universe, one with pixies in it who often answered difficult questions overnight.
In those days a service called Compuserve was the best source of many kinds of information and you paid by the hour to use it. Accordingly, one tended to use it twice a day in two passes, both automated for speed. First you went online, usually in the morning, to download new messages and lists of new topics in various discussion forums. On the second pass, in the evening, replies to downloaded messages were sent and topics and threads of interest (tagged) were retrieved along with new topic headers.
Twenty years on and experts say it’s a good idea to check email twice a day. If you aren’t already doing this at least turn off anything that notifies you of the arrival of new email! Your feelings of wellbeing will increase after initial withdrawal symptoms.
