> And a last thread: Indeed I think to have observed that digital
> technology brings us back to oral traditions. This has been an
> amazing observation to me.
YES! EXACTLY. This is 100% what I have thought sime becoming involved in
listservs in the mid-90's and observing the shift from community providers
like Compuserve to the Web, as well as 'link-rot'.
Consider the ephemeral nature of email - I feel that there will be a huge
archive of historical ephemera that will be lost, creating 'holes' in
historical discourse from the mid-90's. This is, in effect, the topic of my
"Histories of Disappearance" essay (Unfortunately only available on
Portuguese).
This may seem at odds with my recent comments about lingering records on the
net, but not so, as there are inconsistancies in the digital record, and in
many ways, we keep returning to the existential atomic record or to oral
traditions, which have to be transmitted and continually refreshed.
In the coming year, I am creating a personal hardcopy archive of all my
outgoing emails from the past 5 or so years, from whatever machines I still
have,
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