« Whatever will you do?    --    Staring out the window at the kids on recess. »

Three is also the first Fermat prime number!

June 18, 2004

Yeah, I know - you all got used to “new episodes every Friday” meaning “very late Thursday”, and now we’ve gone and ruined your routine. If it helps any it was for a good cause… provided you consider “Brad gets to go watch musicals” a good cause. What was only to be a minor delay was unfortunately amplified by a “Yeah, about that entire day off work…” scenario that would have done Lumbergh proud.

To coincide with our celebration of Day Three I also wanted to give a hearty “shout-out” to forums admin, and all around DED-workaholic Firefox for graduating from University this week. I’d wish Rob the best for his future, but since it will invariably involve him wishing he was back in University, that just seems cruel.

Assuming you all are up-to-date on decision 2004 (and when will the next installment drop? Only mailing list subscribers know for certain!) you are likely not surprised that some of us over at Rocket Ace Moving Pictures Heavy Industries, are avid politico’s and are watching 2004’s heated North American election circuit with interest. One story from the upcoming Canadian national elections that really reverberated with me was that of the NDP Candidate for Edmonton Strathcona Malcolm Azania. I’ve been lead to believe that Malcolm, as a very well spoken young black male has been positoned by the party to be a very visable “face” for the NDP in Alberta. Along comes National Post columnist Colby Cosh who was at the University of Alberta at the same time, and thought that Mr. Azania was a bit of a pompous twit. Sure enough a four minute Google search by Mr. Cosh turned up a ten year old USENET diatribe posted by Malcolm’s radical student alter-ego to soc.culture.african.american entitled JEWS:ENEMIES?FRIENDS?. Colby jots out a sixty word post on his blog pointing to the old post, and the proverbial hilarity ensues. Colby does a pretty good job later on of chronicaling the resulting media fraccas.

Frankly I don’t actually care about the specifics of this particular case all that much, as your view on where to put Azania and Cosh on the “insane radical socialist to calculating muck-raking conservative bastard” spectrum will largely depend on your political leanings to begin with. I will point out that if a simple Google-search now constitutes “Muck-raking” I am personally worse than Frank Magazine.

I will point out that through the cartooning “genius” of Stephen Notley, and Adam Thrasher, and now Azania and Cosh, I probably have a better picture of the political climate of early 90’s University of Alberta than I did of my own Alma Matter. Actually my social activisim at York consisted primarily of forming and sharing a burning “stong dislike” for the Canadian Federation of Students that continues to this day… fodder for a future post perhaps.

Back to what’s interesting about this Azania story to me: The strange permacy and accessability the Internet gives written works, especially during one’s formative “bonehead student” years. Many scholars have written about the so called “Digital Dark Ages” (basically a prediction that since we’re storing more and more information electronically, we’re leaving almost no “hard” records for future generations to understand us by should something cataclysmic happen (or time and indifference take their inevitable toll on the laundry-lists and casual corrospondance of the day). I have yet to read any equal bodies of work about how past writings may come back to haunt us in the more immediate future.

Anyone who runs for political office in this day and age now risks having everything they ever wrote, on web forums, USENET, perhaps even e-mails scoured for ammunition for the opposition even (especially) the volume of digital writings contributed during secondary and post-secondary education, when free time to actively contribute to a variety of Internet discussion forums is more plentiful. Perhaps fair game for the politician, but what about every other aspect of one’s life.

I don’t necessarily want to have potential employers reading what I thought of the Calgary Flames in 1995, (and yes that link was *very* carefully culled from a list of far more embarassing posts… many about comic books).

Can you imagine your girlfriend/boyfriends dad pouring through her MSN logs while you two are out? Do you want your mother-in-law going through the “recently visited” cache of your web-browser?

These are just a few of the areas that Information secrecy is going to come into play. The No Archive metatags are are interesting start, but I’d hazard a guess that the next decade is going to see a lot of ex-Furries and ex-Goths worried about the permacy of data on the ‘net, and perhaps their chances with the NDP.

I chatted about this with Firefox over dinner a couple of nights back, and he didn’t seem to find it different than having one’s grandkids find a box of old journals or letters. The difference, in my mind, is there we choose what we save. It’s unlikely that Grandpa kept the 100s of loveletters he wrote courting other women, or the journal in which he whines incessently about having to clean his room. LiveJournal has no similar self-filtering. When I look at those with less self control than myself
(say certain memebers of past Survivor casts without the good sense not to post “Where can I get Crystal Meth” questions under their real names), I can only laugh when Grandma has to explain “the way things were back in her day.”

Comments

• Search for: