> Will anybody ever read what we write here, after today?

This isn't necessarily a philosophical question. Cary/Salon could analyze and publish longitudinal statistics on page hits for letters.

And I'm going to keep on snowboarding until it all makes sense.

Be careful not to confuse data with information. Until things have been analysed and collated and indexed and grouped etc etc it's just a whole lot of jabber - the good posters, the bad posters, it all goes into the same huge black hole.

It's not until, for example, someone decides to pick up your novel and publish it and market it and promote it that it becomes 'A Novel' - as opposed to an eighty thousand word manuscript that might be the best thing ever written since Proust but no one will ever know about it because they'll be too put off by the enormous slush pile it's sitting under at the publisher's. That's why self publishing is always such a pipe dream (well, I know there are exceptions but that's what they are - exceptions). Because even once it's published without that industrial strength push behind it it stands very little chance amongst the noise created by all the other self published material, and published material.

So - what we need is for PhD students for eg to start doing critical studies of certain posters, and thus drag all of us up out of the mire. If just one or two of us could hit it big a whole world of literary criticism could open up based on these musings. Our best bet for this scenario, methinks, is for one of us to pose naked, wearing horn rimmed glasses and clutching an ibook - a la Carrie on the cover of her book in Sex and the City. That will get the attention of the world. Then it's up to the rest of us to keep it focussed.

The question is, how will all of this writing you're talking about be preserved for future generations? I'm fairly certain that most of it won't be printed on paper, and it's highly questionable whether anything on "the internet" will still be available in electronic form a few decades from now. (The internet is just a means of linking millions of computers; there is no central storage facility for what you see on your screen right now.) Even if it's stored on a hard drive somewhere, will anyone have a computer that can read the data on an antiquated hard drive? (Will we even have electricity in our homes? You take it for granted, but that doesn't mean it will last forever.)

Have you thought about the way that data was stored a few decades ago? Most of it is stored on media that cannot be accessed by modern equipment. Some people are already ringing their hands about all of the programs and data that might never be seen and appreciated again. All of our current data will probably exist only in obsolete form a few decades from now. Unless someone goes to a great deal of trouble to convert it to a new file format and save it on new media every time there's a change in storage technology, it will probably never be seen again.

On a personal note, all of the essays and letters I bothered to save back in college are saved in Macintosh files that cannot be read by current word processing programs, and they are stored on Macintosh floppy disks that cannot be read by modern Apple computers. Fortunately, I have printed copies of most of the material. If I wanted to reproduce it and print fresh copies, I suppose I could use a scanner and OCR software to create new files that could be stored on my current PC. But who knows if I'll have anything even resembling a Macintosh or a PC twenty or thirty years from now? If it's not printed on paper, then for all practical purposes, it will probably be lost.

Dear LW:

I read your letter initially with amusement on the assumption that it was a joke. On the off chance that my initial assumption was incorrect, I offer this advice: you have to stop.

We're talking about an Internet advice column for God's sake. We come here, we share our pain, we offer advice, maybe we even take some solace from the semi-dire situations letter writers present because they remind us that everybody hurts.

But if you weren't joking, then get a grip. You can't want everything in your world to have some biblical permanence. Whatever value value feature of the Internet (such as Cary's column) have in this age are fleeting and...so what? Do you want every comforting conversation you've ever had, every intimate connection, every reassuring word that passes your ears, etc. reduced to a stone tablet and stored for posterity in a climate-controlled vault? If so, you are in for a world of pain.

I would go one step further: In a few decades, all the data may be rendered unreadable by the continual updating of data storage, but in one or two hundred years, the hard drive on the server storing the words I'm typing now will no longer be in any shape to be read at all. Remember that we're talking about sensitive electronics here. The silicon in chips will eventually oxidize and become quartz, and any data stored on those chips will be gone forever.

My concern is less Cary's advice column or even the whole of Salon (which is essentially just a newspaper anyway) than the entirety of our society. I fear that in a few thousand years, no records at all will be left of our time period.

I raised this point some time ago to a friend of mine, but his response was simply that he thought the Internet would persist indefinitely in one form or another. I wish I had such confidence in human progress.

I was surprised to see some of the other letters posted in response to this absolutely sensitive and lovely bit of writing.

It seems they miss the point.

As for me...I have a deep seated feeling, a surety, that all moments are eternal... That the passage of time is just one of the unique ways that we as sentient beings experience existence...

We are the time traveling aspect of our greater being...