Andrew Wooldridge 🌱Carl sagan’s thought about books:
“When our genes could not store all the information necessary for survival, we slowly invented them. But then the time came, perhaps ten thousand years ago, when we needed to know more than could conveniently be contained in brains. So we learned to
stockpile enormous quantities of information outside our bodies. We are the only species on the planet, so far as we know, to have
invented a communal memory stored neither in our genes nor in our brains. The warehouse of that memory is called the library. A book is made from a tree. One glance at it and you hear the voice of another person perhaps someone dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, the author is speaking, clearly and silently, inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people, citizens of distant epochs who never knew one another. Books break the shackles of time, proof that humans can work magic.”
-Carl Sagan, Cosmos
Thomas H Jones III think part of why I feel compelled to write as much as I do comes from that need to externalize and leave a trace. Unfortunately, my writing is all in formats that die when platforms die.
Then again, as a nobody who's never even been an insignificant participant in something significant, it's not like anyone would have come searching for my papers to archive them after my death. So, when my online presences go poof, it's no loss by any objective measur.
BronMason For Kamala 2024This is most of us here. No celebrity and none of what we say preserved. We are significant to our significant others.
Ironically even if one of our profundities could be revived at some point they could be attributed to another as has been pointed out.
I come from a family of nobodies, but it was still interesting to read dead relatives' diaries and letters just to get a day to day view into the times they lived. Feels like much of that dies in our collective move from letters and journals to emails and blogs.
the roamerI do printouts of selected posts and put them together, so that my daughters (now 10) can look at them at some point in the future when I am long gone.