Backlogs of History | The Atlantic - May 1996

Backlogs of History - Cullen Murphy

I subscribe to the following magazines: New Yorker, Lapham's Quarterly, Mutineer, Imbibe, and Esopus.  Not included are the magazines that my wife receives.  And I am considering subscribing to Blue Canvas and The Sun.  When I subscribe to a magazine, I do not discard the back issues.  You can imagine the stack of New Yorker issues.

I'm also an avid reader of comic books and graphic novels, those written for adults.  And I keep most, if not all, of those issues.

How do I store them?  I have them professionally bound into either hardcover or softcover books.  This destroys their value as individual issues of the magazine, but it makes the collection more portable, easier to read, and longer lasting.  (In case you are a fan of the magazine, I assure you that I do not bind the inventive, avant-garde Esopus.  If you are a--reader is not the right word--devotee, enthusiast, of this magazine, then you will understand.  There is nothing quite like it out there.  Tod Lippy is phenomenal.)

It's expensive for sure.  I'm crazy enough to consider doing it for the NYT Magazine starting with 2010.  I need to be surrounded with my consumed words and images.  Why?  What is this need to collect and hoard and organize?

It seems that it is cultural.  Cullen Murphy wonders what the impact of this obsession with record-keeping and document storage will have on future generations of historians.  With technology readily enabling not only the creation but the capture of bajillions of bytes of data, how will we sort through it.  As he says, it might not be so bad if you know specifically what you are looking to find, but if you are browsing or doing research, what are the chances of getting complete information?

Mr. Murphy observes that historians have to make their areas of study narrower and narrower in order to even have a chance at reviewing all of the available material.  Some historians have resorted to sampling data.

It would seem that as long as we keep creating written records (and sound recordings) and the technology keeps improving to store them, we can spend lifetimes exploring other lifetimes.  What will that do to our ability to move forward?  If it takes a lifetime to read through a lifetime, when do we find time to live and create?

My guess is that the answer will be technological.  This will sound ridiculous, but I believe we will discover better ways of organizing and retrieving information and we will find a way to integrate this information with our brains.  Think of it as a super-Google immediately accessible by the human brain.

It'll happen.  Or maybe I should stop sampling the recipes in Mutineer and Imbibe and then writing in this blog.