I have always had messy handwriting. I got into no end of trouble at school because of it, and frequently had to rewrite my school work until my teachers could read it, or they could be convinced that I could read it. This weakness was repulsive to me, and I admired people who seemed able to fill their exercise books with perfectly formed letters, free of error. I longed to be like that.
I used to love having a new, clean exercise book to start a new year with. Unused, pristine stationary can be very alluring, promising a fresh start, when one can learn from past mistakes, and start again. My delight at have a fresh sheet to work with usually lasted until I was halfway through the first line. I would make a spelling mistake or something, and correcting the error only made it worse. Within seconds my lovely new book was ruined, my fresh start squandered. I hadn’t made any progress; I was a messy, sloppy worker, and always would be.
Imagine my delight the first time I used a word processor. Made an error? No problem, just delete it and it will disappear. Keep revising a piece of work until it was perfect, and all your revisions would be invisible. I could produce beautiful pages of text, without any fear of a slip of the hand ruining my good intentions.
This experience of delight no doubt a big influenced my years working as a book typesetter and typographer. Making books look beautiful was a fulfilment of the ambitions of my childhood. I remember staying late at work, typing Beckett short stories into the computer, so that I could lay out the pages in different way, and experiment with different fonts. All my mistyping and bad design decisions could be fixed before they were finalised.
However, the situation has gone full circle. There are many who are concerned about Google and Facebook beginning to infringe on our privacy. Most of these concerns centre of their keeping records of our browsing habits. My growing concern it that everything on the internet is being archived – not just log files, but blog pages. Blog pages which no longer represent the person you are but the person you were. Part of our privacy, surely, should be the right to have the foolish things we say to our friends forgotten.
So, now, when I start to work on a new blog post, the old anxieties are returning. When you post something, it is forever: stored in a cache somewhere, captured and archived as an RSS feed. I don’t mind having what I say on twitter ‘overheard’ by people as I type it: I couldn’t, otherwise I wouldn’t post it in a public arena. But I can’t help resenting the permanence of internet discourse, which causes me to pause sometimes before entering into a debate. I would not pause when face to face with people, where my friends could be relied upon to keep the good, and let the nonsense be forgotten.
