More of the nightmare

I think it has been well-noted here that I kinda like connections with the past. It used to be that people wrote letters to each other...many would keep them and many famous people had large libraries of letters that could be published and we'd see into their lives. Diaries of the famous had a tendency to be published.

Now, what do we have? Blogs. E-mail. Considering that we need a "Wayback Machine" web site that lets us see the web that used to be, it would seem that so much effort nowadays is going into the maintenance of material that will disappear when the effort to maintain it also disappears. Page through this blog site and you'll see any number of blogs that are abandoned - including mine for awhile.

Correspondences that used to be able to be tracked for years between historical figures via their saved mail will no longer be possible as e-mail is flushed and destroyed as a matter of course. There are a precious few who still use analog diaries. But it seems that all this has degraded and the famous simply publish memoirs where they can make their history as palatable as they wish.

Is this progress? I am more and more inclined to agree with Neil Postman's view that we may very well "amuse ourselves to death" before long.