"When our digital selves are always available, will we ever become part of the past?"

 

No attempt to make ourselves permanent will succeed.  

"It's too bad she won't live!  But then again, who does?"

 

 No digital record,  no image, no video, no audiotape: none of those will make a flawed, imperfect person last forever.  When we are gone,  we will be gone.    Making copies of copies will not change those facts.    

 

 

How long has man tried to make time stand still ?    Decades ago,  as they marketed phonographic records,  RCA tried to sell the fiction.  His master's voice.      Records became tape became discs became  zeros and ones.    The attempts change.  The quality of the reproduction improves.     And yet

And yet.

 

They all fail.   Because they are all shadows.  Echoes.   A warm place in a bed that is empty. 

 

Will we stop trying to make past future?   Of course not.    Americans in particular love playing with things.   

Daylight savings time - in a country where they turn back time....   Every year.   And every year we give the hour back.  

Losing nothing.   Gaining nothing.   

 

 

There are thousands of people now hard at work to prove me wrong.   Their goal is to create digital records that mirror our very lives.   A dream of infinite  lives for the lucky few.    Maybe when I was younger, that might have appealed to me, but not longer.    My words are enough of a record I think.

 

"Part of the definition of the past is its inaccessibility"

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Quotations and inspiration obviously from Glowing Fish and his thought provoking piece (see above) from four years ago.   Four years is a long time ago in internet time,  and a blink of an eye in the history of man's attempt to freeze the past.