First post; Around the Blogosphere in 80 ways.

Well, I've created another blog.

I imagine that yet again I will be feverishly updating the my journal for up to (but not including) week, then I will start to drop off, maybe visiting once every 7 days, then every 14 days and finally 2 months after its inception, I will never type out this address ever again.

Such is life in the Blogosphere. I know, I've been there....
You see, I've been around the Blogging block from my first angelfire site, to my myspace account, to my skyblog (which actually still serves as a useful image hosting service), the pattern seems to take on the form of a terrible inevitability, waiting until the portal through which the pages of my blog are viewed, is closed for the last time, plunging the quivering posts into darkness and condemning the information contained within to stew, eternally lost within the behemoth that is the internet.

I often wonder if anyone has ever come across my old blogs or sites read a few pots and thought to themselves "what an interesting guy," or "This guy's life is so boring I think I want to die." It is a subject upon which I have often mused, but it becomes even more interesting when you start to wonder if some future archaeologists will be browsing the plethora of information we are currently imprinting on hundreds of different servers scattered across the globe. It reminds me of a poem written by the author/illustrator of Calvin and Hobbes - Bill Watterson, in which Calvin dreams of the future and contemplates upon the possibility of having his bones being dug up by aliens and put together incorrectly, finally being labeled "Evolution's Mistake." How much of what we write about our everyday lives is going to be understood in 10,000 years time? Assuming someone is around to understand it, it seems there are two possible outcomes.

The first is; we will be misunderstood, the fragments of the information we are recording will not be enough for someone to accurately make a picture of 21st century life. It is possible that we are not skilled enough in our understanding of the nature of universality, and as such we assume that people will understand, without prompting, certain things we take for granted in our everyday lives. As a result it is impossible for an outsider to ever accurately understand what makes us tick. This is what I think the most common-sense view is.

The second possibility is more interesting. What if thanks to the advent of blogs, internet communities, XML, and "Web 2.0", life on planet earth doesn't ever change again? All the information the human race has ever discovered is rapidly being uploaded to places like wikipedia, almost every photo taken now is created in digital format and is posted at least somewhere on the net, the same is true for every video, every drawing, painting, sketch, essay, short story, long story, poem and any other work of art. Finally the latest thing we feel the need to archive is ourselves. In the words of the blog, we find our immortality, the sip from the Holy Grail. Every thought that crosses our minds is being recorded, filed away, ready to be recalled at a moments notice anywhere in the world. If we are not our bodies (for we can never step in the same river twice - Heroclitus,) we must be our minds. If we record everything that enters our mind a new question must then be asked: Where are we?

If we record every atom (in the old sense of the word) of ourselves on a computer, are we now floating around in cyberspace? Does any part of us stay in the realm of information? This brings up an ethical question that was touched upon earlier in this post. What happened to all the recordings I made of myself and then abandoned like a horse with a broken leg? Should I take steps to erase every iota of my previous life that has found its way onto the internet in an effort to extend mercy to my unwitting half-creations of myself? If I should, then should I take steps to erase myself from the minds of everyone who has met me?

Scary stuff to be sure, but I'm not gonna let my own unplanned, unjustified, and ill-considered whims take me down the route of V-tech, I think this is a matter that will have to be revisited, in a more structured fashion.

Stay tuned for (possibly) more musings on this topic. Lets see where we end up.

Maybe as Typhus I can keep this blog alive