The scary thing is the permanency of it all. Once your thoughts are typed into a computer, they become indestructible ones and zeros. You can’t just crumple up the page and toss it in the trash like frustrated writers of yore. If your writing is posted on the internet, you’re saying hello to immortality, whether you like it or not. Even the fleeting conversations of bulletin boards and chat-rooms are recorded somehow, somewhere. The web has made everyone into Shakespeares, their words indelibly engraved for posterity.
Not that posterity will care one whit. One irony of the computer age is that the web’s wordage has already far surpassed all that was every printed in the centuries before, so it’s inevitable that you get lost in the crowd. The pulp pumped out by a Harlequin novelist may have more chance of being remembered in the future than the brilliant musings of a Salon.com columnist.
The web has done wonderful things. It can perhaps be credited with keeping down the Berlin Wall by opening up the flow of information to and from eastern Europe. But at the same time it’s brought down personal walls of privacy. Your demographic profile is carefully noted by Microsoft when you turn on your computer for the first time, and every online shopping site gets its hooks into you as soon as you fill out a customer profile and type in your credit card number. Meanwhile, your web-browsing habits are tracked via ‘cookies’ – little programs planted on your computer by a web site and reactivated when you revisit the site.
How wonderful it was in the early days of the net to imagine yourself an anonymous free spirit roaming cyberspace. No more. The real people behind e-mail personas can be easily unmasked. When HealthSouth was hit by net rumors, it did a little detective work then launched lawsuits against ‘gletel’ and ‘Loony987’. When E*Trade was bothered by bulletin board chat from someone using a secrecy shield, it just hacked through: ‘My non-anonymizer was better than his anonymizer,’ boasted the company.
The permanency of web words has come back to haunt many, bringing a new wave of prosecutions for securities fraud, not to mention a slow sexual harassment litigation. Somewhere there may be a detective who unravels old typewriter ribbons to find clues, or who deciphers the last message on a notepad from the impression left by a suspect’s ballpoint pen. More likely, though, he’s a computer whiz excavating the magnetic after-effects from erased computer files.
Shakespeare can keep his printed page. It, like he, will be dust in a few dozen more generations. Zeros and ones, on the other hand, are forever.
