Fungible Conviction #7: The future is the past.
Though all the hype about the Internet is about its hurtling us into a beautiful, linked-arms future, a huge portion of tomorrow’s ‘net will in fact be the past. We’re turning into a world of archivists, given the declining cost of server space and the increased public access to (and understanding of) memory-preserving tools like blogs, digital cameras, and flash drives.
We’re not talking about your aunt’s online genealogy project anymore. We’re already in the age of archive.org and its live (recorded) music project; of librivox.org’s attempt to voice-record every literary text in the public domain; of the Hollywood Animation Archive; of Wikipedia; of Google Video; of Flickr; and, yes, of your aunt’s online genealogy project, which now features photographs of known relatives tied to a GoogleMaps mashup of their locations.
Literary magazines have an opportunity (and I would say obligation) to take part in this informal but massive project—to make available their archives. Two or three years ago, you could argue that most of the great literary writing was effectively lost; if you didn’t know what you were looking for nor the library at which to find it, you didn’t have a chance of finding lesser-known Mencken, early Paris Reviews, or a pointed letter to the editor by Reinhold Neibuhr.
But now we have all the necessary ingredients for an organized literary past: tools to grant us the access, and experienced editors to link the stray bits and provide context. The magazine AGNI already makes a point to publish rediscovered (and, often, retranslated) work online. All literary publications should follow that lead, into the past.
