This blog isn’t the only journal I keep, though it is the most comprehensive and long-lasting and the one that is public. I also keep a hand-written writing journal, a hand-written diabetes journal and a hand-written self-publishing journal. If this seems odd or anachronistic, it goes back to something I observed in the late 1980s when I worked at the Lands Tribunal for Scotland: it was far easier to access and read hand-written eighteenth century documents and records than more recent computerised ones. For the paper records, carefully written in registrar’s ink, you needed your eyes and a familiarity with the handwriting of the time; for computerised records you needed access to a system capable of retrieving and displaying the files.

Soon after that I went back to university for a second degree, and some of the things I wrote then, typically in MS Word for Works, are now inaccessible without conversion software. Likewise things that anyone wrote on the emergent popular word processors of the day, such as the Amstrad, were produced in a format and on a medium that are, to all intents and purposes, inaccessible without carefuly preserved technology. My typewritten essays from my first degree (and prints of my essays and notes from my second degree), by contrast, all sit in boxfiles and are perfectly readable, albeit embarassing.

I came across the same phenomenon again and again, often in tangential contexts, but the underlying operator is the persistence of technologies and ideas long after they might have been thought to be long-gone. I was fond at one time of talking about how the structure of modern computerised accounting and finance systems demonstrate the persistence of the banking practices of renaissance Italy, but more physical examples can be found in the persistence of such things as corrugated metals as building material and the continued manufacture and sale of rickshaws. In the context of typewriters, the English-language QWERTY keyboard, developed to avoid the typebars of letters frequently used together from jamming when typing at speed, survives to the keyboard of the laptop on which I’m writing this. And paper and ink is a phenomenally succesful and persistent technology that will survive any collapse of the IT infrastructure on which so much of modern daily life depends.

The fancy name for this is the Lindy Effect. Lindy’s is a deli. in New York, famous at one time for its cheesecake. Actors used to meet there, and somewhere along the line someone posited that the best predictor of how long a Broadway show would run was how long it had already run. A hit was likely to stay a hit. It appeared in print in 1964 as the future career expectation of a television comedian is proportional to the total amount of his past exposure on the medium. This observation was given mathematical shape by Benoit Mandelbrot in his The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and it was he who called it “the Lindy Effect.”

The idea has gained a lot of currency in recent years, in part through the tireless advocacy of Nassim Nicholas Taleb. I’m not in any way qualified to follow Mandelbrot or Taleb’s mathematics and, for my purposes, there is no need to try. The key point is that the future life of something scalable and non-perishable, such as technology or an idea, is proportionate to how long it has already been around.

Anyway, the point I wanted to get to is that my blogging, now dating back nearly 20 years and forming something of a diary of my adult life, albeit a partial and self-selecting diary, exists only in digital form – a form that will change and, in all probability, become redundant and inaccessible if I’m not around to keep updating it. This might not matter if you consider it to be ephemeral and its preservation an act of vanity, but from the perspective of my family tree and family history, I would be overjoyed to find an ancestor had kept a journal that I could read (the one whom I know to have done so destroyed it all before she died.)

So from the perspective of any future family historian who has some degree of relationship to me, it would be worth my producing something from my 20 years of blogging in a physical format that they could read without cursing technological change – and paper and ink is the way to do that. I talked about this last year in relation to my Covid Diary, but really I ought to think about something grander as an ongoing project.

Or should I?