As we all know, the people who created “The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show” back in 1959 were geniuses, but none of the writers and animators were quite as brilliant, of course, as one of their creations, Mr. Peabody. I refer of course to the anthropomorpic hound who is, as Wikipedia states:
…the smartest being in existence, having graduated from Harvard when he was 3 years old. (“Wagna cum laude“).
But I’ve got a little beef with him about his Wayback Machine, which enabled him and Sherman to travel back through history at will.
More accurately, my problem is with the folks who set up the website named for Mr. Peabody’s most famous invention.
Don’t get me wrong. Those folks are wonderful. The Internet Archive Wayback Machine is one of the most amazing things the internet has given us. It’s almost up there with Google Maps, which could thoroughly absorb me every minute of the rest of my life, if I let it. (Since I am the most distractable being in the universe, I can no longer read a book without pausing to look up each geographical reference to see where it is in respect to other places I know, checking the latitude and longitude, zooming down to ground level with the satellite filter and shifting to Street View to travel up and down the avenue, clicking in closer on interesting buildings… It’s ridiculous.)
The Wayback Machine may not take us back to enjoy a tête-à-tête with Cleopatra, but it does something else pretty startling. It gives us information that no longer exists (at least, not as we mere intermediate users can tell).
But here’s the thing: It’s not perfect. I don’t know if this has to do with different universes creating static and interfering with each other or what (forgive me if I’m getting too technical for you), but… well, it’s not perfect, Mr. Peabody.
Say, if you go back looking for something you wrote on a website that no longer exists, because (for instance) you don’t want to have to research and write that again, you may go back and connect to a site on a certain date, a date when you know the content you need was there, and you get to the home page, and you click on the page you want… and the content isn’t there, or is only partially there.
Which is a bit of a letdown. This probably doesn’t matter much to you, but it’s a big deal to me, because I see the internet a bit differently, as a result of my own particular history of traumatic experiences. You know how veterans of war or horrific natural disasters have trouble shaking the experience, sometimes for the rest of their lives?
Well, my form of PTSD results from all those decades of putting out newspapers under severe time pressure and space limitations. And while you may rightly regard that as less serious than those other kinds of PTSD, it produces some of the same symptoms. Such as dreams. For instance, I frequently wake up exhausted from what seems like hours of trying to crank out the paper in spite of inexplicable technical problems.
Anyway, the Web would be a magnificent thing, to me, even if it did nothing but eliminate this one former problem: As a reporter in the olden days, you’d work yourself half to death getting the needed info and writing it, and then the next day, it’s being used to wrap fish. I don’t begrudge readers using it that way, if fish wrap is what they need. But the thing is, after you publish that first story, you will then have to write multiple followups, assuming the story is ongoing, and most big, breaking stories end up in that category.
And since what you wrote before is now inaccessible to the reader, every single time there is a new development, you have to waste half of the few inches of precious space you have giving the background of what happened before this latest development. It’s ENORMOUSLY wasteful.
With the Web, there’s zero need for that. Give the reader an HTML link, and you’re done.
That is, assuming the frickin’ link works.
So… to put it in different terms, I cannot for a second understand why kids would waste time posting on, say, Snapchat. Or post on Instagram in that way that it goes away as soon as (or before) you’ve had a chance to glance at it.
If I don’t want it to be there and handy after I write it, why would I write it in the first place? (Even if it is something silly like this post.)
It’s not that I expect the Web to be eternal. Or at least, not exactly. I realize it could all disappear instantly if Dr. Evil figured out how to set off EMP devices over every population center on the planet. Suddenly, we’d be back in the Stone Age (or back in times before Google Maps, which, if you look at things from a geological perspective, is practically the same thing, being no more than 15 millennia or so off).
So, speaking of the Stone Age, I’d like stuff to last at least as long as something one of my Neanderthal ancestors once etched on a rock. I mean, that’s not an easy medium to store in a library, but at least it’s something.
All I want is for the Wayback Machine to work perfectly. Is that really too much to ask, Mr. Peabody?
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