Every so often, I go to a Web search engine and enter "kafalas" just for fun. Awhile back, I tried this and found several links to a series of on-line messages I'd posted roughly ten years ago (several years before the Web was even a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye), on a bulletin board called DECUServe. DECUServe was, at the time, a private, subscription-only bulletin board, accessible only to members of the Digital Equipment Computer Users Society (DECUS). As is often the case in on-line discussions, sometimes things got rather heated. I got into electronic shouting matches ("flame wars") with people on occasion -- regardless of whether or not I knew what I was talking about.
I don't do flame wars anymore -- I like to think it's because I'm more mature at 35 than I was at 25. Having let my membership to DECUS lapse several years ago, I'd pretty much forgotten about DECUServe and the discussions I used to participate in, way back when. So you can imagine my surprise when I found that DECUServe was alive and well and living on the Web in 1998 -- and that their ancient discussion archives from the '80s were available to anyone with a Web browser!
I dropped a friendly note to the system administrator, asking him why on Earth the old discussions were deemed fit for Web-wide viewing. He told me, "You're the first person who's complained about it. The DECUS membership voted to put the stuff on the Web, so we put it out there." To his credit, he did offer to delete any individual postings of mine that I felt might be particularly worthy of deletion. I haven't bothered to take him up on it. But in principle, I was upset at what they'd done. Bulletin-board discussions are supposed to be temporary, off-the-cuff exchanges, such as you'd have in a bar, or at least, in a meeting at the office -- they're not generally something you want to see preserved for all time.
Extended Family
I've discovered a lot of other information by searching for "kafalas" on the Web. I found out that last year, my Aunt Catherine gave some money (I forget the exact amount, but it's out there) to Globe Santa, a charity that buys toys for kids at Christmas time. I also found that my young cousin Jason is a member of his high school's computer society.
I've kept track of my older cousin Philip's career. Philip is an authority on Chinese literature -- in particular, that of the late Ming dynasty. I've followed his academic travels from Stanford to Wellesley to Grinnell to Georgetown. Along the way, Philip gave a paper at the Association for Asian Studies conference in 1996, entitled, "Weighty Matters, Weightless Form: Politics and the Ming Xiaopin Writer." According to a summary of the session, Philip argued "that even where late Ming literary forms ostensibly eschew political content they continue to be structured by the realities of power in 16th and 17th century China, and to reflect and express the political concerns of their authors."
It's all well and good that such information is available on the Web. It's nice to be able to keep up with what friends and relatives are up to -- especially when you've moved away from your ancestral homeland, as I've done in moving from Massachusetts to Illinois. However, a lot of transitory information -- day-to-day stuff that's not really intended to be permanent -- gets saved, too.
No Eraser
There's an organization called the Internet Archive, which has as its stated goal to archive everything posted on the Internet: that includes Web sites, Usenet newsgroups, FTP sites (places where software is stored so that you can retrieve and distribute it), and anything else that's publicly accessible. The organization's mission statement says that it's trying to "preserve our digital history" by making a copy of everything it can get its hands on, that's available through the Internet. (Obviously, they've got some pretty serious disk storage. They estimate the current size of the Web at 1.5 terabytes.)
This sounds like a great idea -- and in some ways, it is. But a lot of the material that's out there isn't intended to be permanent. When I was posting messages on the DECUServe bulletin board ten years ago, I assumed they'd be read by a few hundred (or, perhaps, a few thousand) people, then forgotten and eventually housecleaned into oblivion. If I'd had any idea they were going to be preserved forever, I'd have thought twice about participating in the first place.
Participating in any on-line discussion that's accessible via the Web is something I think twice about, at this point. Usenet newsgroups are so readily retrievable via DejaNews that anything you post to a newsgroup can be instantly viewed by anyone -- friends, foes, potential employers or clients, you-name-it. It's as if Linda Tripp were following you around with a microphone, recording your every offhanded remark to use against you at some future time. Many trade magazines provide electronic versions of much of their content, including letters to the editor, on the Web. My search for "kafalas" turned up a couple of these, as well.
I suppose if I wanted to keep my electronic paper trail to a minimum, I should just shut up. That's certainly a compelling argument. But I hate to have to throw the baby out with the bathwater like that. It's a shame that there's no such thing as a temporary piece of information or conversation anymore, that every little scratch we make in the electronic sand is preserved forever for later retrieval. This has already caused legal problems in at least one case I've heard of, where information someone posted on a Web site was archived and later used as evidence, by the Webmaster's ex-spouse, even though the Web site itself had been taken off the air.
Once the Internet Archive gets these words onto its optical disks, they'll be there forever. The Archive says that it "will move the data to new media and new operating systems every 10 years," until the end of time. Perhaps I should be flattered that they're granting me -- along with everyone else on the Web -- a certain measure of immortality. Maybe so. But when I think how much I've changed over time, it's unsettling that stuff I wrote ten years ago, before I hit 30 and grew a brain (see How'd I get here?, April 28) is still out in circulation. Some day, I'll probably be saying the same thing about this column.
Copyright © 1998 John J. Kafalas