The Permanence of Blogging

Writing became the pipeline that allowed precise messages to be passed on to subsequent generations.  From inscriptions carved on hardened stone to mass-produced copies of books, the words of ancestors long gone remained to haunt or instruct, in a manner that made our species quite unique.  No longer did distortions caused by word of mouth dilution threaten to wipe out the meaning of the original message.

The last decade has seen a democratization of the ongoing human dialogue, driven by new technologies and the realization that cooperation among tribes makes more survival sense in a world of plenty than a state of permanent warfare.  But there is a growing feeling that words in the ether lack the gravitas that words printed on paper possess. Blogging has an immediacy about it and has become a preferred path for rumor and instantaneous comment.  But will the blogposts of today be around tomorrow like all the great books are?

In the past, libraries were funded because leaders saw the value of safeguarding the ebb and flow of creativity, but the blogosphere and its cyber-father, the Internet, have bloomed into great cultural institutions without the parallel sense that their content is precious and should be saved and archived in a Cyber-Library of Congress. 

It's probably safe to predict that the behemoths of the blogosphere like Slashdot and Boing Boing will exist in some archival form for years to come, but what about the millions of less important blogs created by teenagers and others for their own edification?  These may be as important for future generations as the Drudge Report and Huffington Post seem to be for ours, but for reasons yet to be articulated. 

It is not difficult to imagine a future historian mining thousands of these typical online diaries to track the evolution of language or to define the evolution of social trends, much as present-day historians pour over sales records and crop diaries of the Civil War period to paint a more complete portrait of slavery or of technological development. 

There are already attempts being made to archive all the early, and now defunct, history of the Internet, but the sheer mass of blogging verbiage and its mostly ephemeral nature suggest that blogs might not be treated with the same degree of curator love as the iconic early web.  It would take a government or a corporation with extraordinary foresight and the guts to stick to a long-range vision to implement a kind of Cyber Repository open to all.  Are there any takers out there?