Disposable Communication and the Lost Digital Generation

I recently finished reading Joseph J. Ellis's Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation, the final chapter of which is about the John Adams/Thomas Jefferson correspondence, which lasted from 1812 until 1826, when both men died on the same day. In many ways, it is remarkable, considering how easy it is to destroy paper, that these letters are still around and available to the reading public. It is even more remarkable, however, that the Adams/Jefferson correspondence is not unique. Throughout the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, it was common for people to write letters and preserve them for posterity.

People still preserve communication. In fact, our society has become so communication-saturated that it seems almost impossible not to preserve communication, since the digital forums through which we transmit our communications often do the preservation and archiving for us. Still, while I have a digital record of all of my e-mail sent since 2005, I have no hard copy to speak of. Should I buy the proverbial farm, so to speak, kick the fatal bucket, or shuffle off the mortal coil, my family and friends will have no access to my digital correspondences unless they know the password for my e-mail account. My question, therefore, is this: what happens to such digital correspondences when the forums or technology that produce them become outmoded and obsolete? What will happen to your g-mail archive--or your blog, for that matter--when Google goes bust?

In many ways, we now approach written communication as something relatively disposable. To be sure, written communication has never been more popular. Text messaging, for example, has enabled people to carry on conversations in real time without ever opening their mouths. E-mail and online message boards have made correspondence faster and easier. Blogs have given everyone (including me) the opportunity to become a published writer--even if they have nothing to say. What is more, Facebook and other social networking sites have made it possible, via the "status update" feature, for people to create an hourly (yea, even a minute-to-minute) written record of their daily activities. No other era in history has written more than our own. Yet, what are the collected works of our era but words written on the swift current of an ever-widening river?

Two hundred years from now historians will likely face two problems. First, in their efforts to analyze and interpret our day and age, they will be overwhelmed with the surplus of digital junk--digital photos, documents, etc.--that they have to sift through in order to get at our heart and soul (provided, of course, that the technology needed to access our digital junk is still around). Second, once they are through sifting the digital junk, they will struggle to find our heart and soul because the forms of written communication that we have used to express ourselves most personally--text messages, e-mails, blogs, Facebook statuses, etc.--have been written on forms of disposable digital media. After all, what text-message conversation will outlast a cell phone replacement or an old cell phone plan? What e-mail will survive a discarded or forgotten e-mail address? What minute-by-minute Facebook status record will survive Facebook's inevitable demise? The fact of the matter is this: unless we actively archive our words on some enduring medium, they will be lost to time.

In Founding Brothers, Ellis makes the point that Adams and Jefferson were writing not only for themselves, but also for the generations of Americans who would follow them. That is, they wrote deliberately and with the knowledge that their correspondence would survive. Today, it seems, we often write without much thought for tomorrow. Will our posterity want to read our text messages? Will they want to know what our Facebook status was at 7:32 am on Tuesday, January 27, 2009? Maybe. Maybe not. I am willing to bet, however, that they will want to read something of substance from us--something that reveals, on a personal level, who we were as a generation.

Ernest Hemingway and his contemporaries were called the "Lost Generation" because they were perceived as being morally lost in the post World War I world. In many ways, today's generation is rapidly becoming a new lost generation--a "Lost Digital Generation," if you will--because what it has to say is written instantly, received and processed rapidly, and then immediately deleted.

Cormac McCarthy's The Crossing: A Review

The Crossing is the second novel in Cormac McCarthy's so-called Border Trilogy. It tells the story of Billy Parham, a young man from New Mexico, who travels three separate times through Mexico in order to accomplish some personal mission. Along the way he encounters various drifters, cripples, gypsies, and aging revolutionaries who dispense wisdom and insight about the world.

While The Crossing is the second book in the Border Trilogy, it really stands on its own as a novel. It begins about a decade before the events of All the Pretty Horses, the first Border novel, and is similar to it in basic theme only. While All the Pretty Horses is much more reader-friendly (with lots of page-turning action and romance), The Crossing seems unconcerned about giving the reader an exciting plot. In fact, plot often takes second place to the big ideas that McCarthy is trying to work out through this narrative--and I use the word "trying" intentionally because I do not think he always succeeds.

That's not to say, of course, that this novel is a failure. The Crossing has a lot on its mind, and I would be lying to say that I came close to grasping half of it. It is the kind of novel that takes several readings to understand well (which, at 426 dense pages, is no easy task). Often, it seems, McCarthy's characters are attempting to negotiate the divides between realms of perceptions, such as the "real" and "unreal" or the "knowable" and "unknowable." The oft-recurring motif of the border crossing--the physical movement from one land to another--underscores this idea. All the Pretty Horses, from what I remember of it, is not half as cerebral as this novel.

Needless to say, if you are not interested in negotiating realms of perception, this novel might not be for you.

For all of its abstract ideas, though, The Crossing also tells an interesting story. Billy Parham's three "crossings" into Mexico cover much of the same terrain (physically and psychologically), yet each time he learns something new about himself and the world in which he lives. Over the course of the book, Billy's initial idealism is tried and tested and eventually worn down by failures, disappointments, and tragedies.

Again, if failure, disappointment, and tragedy are not your thing--skip this one.

Ultimately, I think that I liked The Crossing more than All the Pretty Horses. I also think that I liked it better than Blood Meridian, if only because it was not drenched in as much senseless blood and gore. The Crossing is a thoughtful novel about the tragedies and disappointments of youth, but it does not approach that subject with sentimentality. If grim novels about the loss of youthful idealism are your thing, give it a try--I mean, it only took me about six months to read.

HBO's John Adams: Balancing History and Drama

Had David McCullough never written his best-selling (and Pulitzer Prize winning) biography of John Adams, it is unlikely that HBO Films--or any motion picture studio, for that matter--would have thought of making a biopic about a founder father who enjoys neither the popularity of Thomas Jefferson nor the name recognition of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin. Indeed, thanks to McCullough, Adam's life and political career (and reputation) have been salvaged from the dust of history, packaged and delivered--in the best-selling form of popular narrative history--for the rabble masses that Adams often mistrusted. McCullough, therefore, also deserves further credit for HBO's recent mini-series on Adams, which is based on McCullough's book and also brings the founder's important and often over-looked legacy into the homes of those who were too lazy to read the book.

Admittedly, I am one of those who fall into the latter category. While I have owned the book since 2003, I was only able to read about 125 pages of it before I became distracted with another book (which tends to happen  a lot to me, since I try to read three or four books at a time). Still, my interest in finishing John Adams has never really diminished, and now, having watched all seven episodes of the HBO series, I have more of an interest in finishing it than ever.

HBO's John Adams, is a dramatic retelling of the United States of America's first 50 years. Adams, of course, is at the center of the action, along with Abigail Adams and the rest of the Adams family; Jefferson, Franklin, Washington, and Hamilton are very much secondary characters. Each episode of the series stands on its own; unlike other mini-series, no one episode leads smoothly into the next. Often, a lot of history is sacrificed on the altar of dramatic necessity--which is to be expected when 50 years of history is condensed into nine hours of film. Fortunately, the filmmakers did a fairly good job in making a project of this scope work. John Adams could have easily been fourteen episodes long, but that would have been a lot to ask from an audience. Overall, John Adams is a nice compromise.

The strength of this mini-series is its characterizations of the founders. Adams is a complex figure who has as many obvious flaws as he has extraordinary talents. The series makes much of his vanity and compulsive tactlessness, as well as his devotion to those whom he considered to be his best friends, namely Abigail and Jefferson. Also, it spends significant time on his struggle with parenthood (some of the best-acted scenes in the series, in fact, involve his role as a parent). Its characterizations of Jefferson, Franklin, and Washington are also excellent and do much to make them not appear like the marble statues they have become in our historical memory. Only Alexander Hamilton, who comes closest to being the "bad guy" of the series, comes across as being a little one-dimensional.

John Adams does have some shortcomings. Occasionally, the series depicts a historical event that, while action-packed, does little to advance the general story line. Adam's participation in an amputation during his first crossing of the Atlantic, for example, makes for an interesting scene--but little else. Personally, I wish the series gave more attention to politics than pageantry; the episode involving the Continental Congress, for example, seems incomplete, as does the episode involving Washington's presidency. That said, no episode entirely disappoints.

The tag-line for the series is "He United the States of America." At first, I thought this was a pretty clever piece of movie studio hyperbole. Now, however, having learned more about Adams and his contributions to America's founding, I think the line is appropriate. Adams, however vain and obnoxious he may have been, believed in doing what he felt was right, even if it wasn't always popular. When his contemporaries were separating into political parties, for example, or crying out for war against their European enemies, he resisted the trend and chose to follow a much more moderate path. The mini-series argues that doing so lost him the election of 1800 (and a more prominent place in popular history), yet ensured the stability of the new nation. If such was actually the case, Adams deserves all seven episodes that HBO has allotted to his life.

A Study in Reading Habits: Low-Tech Advice

Five Rules I Read By:

1. Never read a history book by an author who is a journalist. Journalists aren't historians and usually do not write very good history. Journalists who are interested in history ought to take lessons from Tony Horwitz. He does not write history--he writes about it.

2. Be wary of novels by New England writers. I have nothing against New England and New Englanders, but I rarely like their novels. Since the days of Emerson and Thoreau, our friends from the Northeast have acted as if they own American literature. Usually, their novels are about self-absorbed thirty-somethings who have no grasp on life and wonder (over the course of 400 pages) why their lives persist in sucking. I recommend reading writers from anywhere south and west of New York.*

3. Avoid memoirs. Memoirs tend to consist of an overabundance of whine and cheese--if you catch my drift. I'm not usually interested in someone's alcohol problem or spiritual odyssey through Southeast Asia. I'd rather watch a Sponge Bob marathon than taint my soul with crap like Eat, Pray, Love or Reading Lolita in Tehran. If I want to read about someone's life, I'll read his or her biography (as long as he or she is dead).**

4. Remember that few novels sold at Wal-mart are worth reading. My heart grew sick the other day when I saw that Wal-mart is selling a mass-market paperback edition of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Sure, good literature seems to be reaching the masses--but what price glory?

5. Avoid novels with a happy endings. Happy endings are for Hollywood. Nothing ruins a novel like a happy ending. As one of my BYU professors put it, a novel that ends happily is a novel that ends too soon. If I hear that a novel is uplifting or inspiring, I usually do not bother with it. I get my daily doses of happiness from real life. When I want to escape the happiness of the world around me, I stick my nose in a depressing book. Catharsis does wonders for the soul.***

* Yes, I know neither Emerson nor Thoreau were novelists. And I know that Cormac McCarthy was born in Rhode Island.
**I once read an excerpt of Eat, Pray, Love and nearly lost both of my eyes when they rolled too far back in my head. I actually don't know much about Reading Lolita--and what I do know about it doesn't interest me. I have read Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed, which is an example of memoir at its worst. I wouldn't line a hamster cage with that book. Educator Mike Rose has a lot of good things to say about education in America, but his memoir Lives of the Boundary spends far too much time on his often-irrelevant life experiences.
***Not all happy endings are bad. An ambiguous ending has saved many an overly happy ending.