Blogging, Criticism and Eternity

After reading a post on Tam's blog about verbal abuse in blog comments, I started thinking about this new communication medium: Andy Warhol was right about the 15 minutes of fame, and the future is now. When I read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, I am reading Chaucer's impression of his 14th century English compatriots. Sanitized by Chaucer, packaged by a master so as to be just as human today as they were then.

One thing that Warhol did not foresee: Digital archiving of the written word. From Chaucer's time, flash forward around 600 years, and we don't need Chaucer's ribald, yet sanitized impression of the current breed of commoner, we get it straight from the commoners themselves. Imagine if we could read the writings of the common man of 1400. Would they be any more lucid or forward thinking than our trolling troglodytes of today?

Flash forward 600 years from today. December 14th 2608, mid afternoon. In a classroom on mars, high school students are studying the early 21st century, reading the views of the common citizen of the USA regarding the "War on Terror". They will read our blog postings, our comments on other blogs, our letters to the editor, all of it. Our racial slurs against our enemy, our hot blooded arguments and taunts, all there for all of humanity to read, our writings will live on as long as humanity does. Thanks to DARPA and Al Gore, we are all as Plato, our words carved into stone for all eternity, although some of us carve with bent chisels.

Now for the flip side, as mentioned above by Tam. Just as everyone can be a writer in this new medium, they can also be critics, and some are not aware that their words will outlive their grandchildren.