Time to Reflect

I want to start this column with a shout-out to a small and oft-ignored subset of my readers. I don’t mean residents of Pfoho or my aunts down in New Jersey, though I’m glad they’re reading too. Instead, I want to acknowledge my as-of-this-writing-unborn grandchildren. I want to do this because it occurred to me recently that some day, as my distant kin are sitting in their dorm rooms in Allston looking out onto their gorgeous new student center (or, heaven forbid, envying it from somewhere down in New Haven), they might get bored and Google their granddad. So, hi guys!

Much has been said and written about privacy on the Internet, especially concerning the sort of personal information that might make its way to employers, parents, or significant others. Much too has been made of the importance of putting creative work in digital form for the benefit of our peers and for the sake of human intellectual endeavor. But I’d wager that no one ever thinks about one peculiar side effect of all of this: it’s not just our peers we’re exposing ourselves to—it’s our progeny.

Effectively, everything we now write and put online is a time capsule. What’s more, we aren’t burying these capsules in a town square or hiding them in a basement. Instead, we’re adding our blog posts, reports of athletic successes, and drunken party photos alike into an enormous network of carefully catalogued, redundant, and disaster-resistant libraries, each standing at the ready for researchers down the road, be they academicians or curious teenagers, to query. Our relationship with the future has never been nearly this close before.

Digitization of archives such as the Crimson’s has accelerated this process a bit by making it retroactive, and as such allows us a small taste of what’s to come. Much of the information therein is more or less innocuous: it’s unlikely that the family of E.Q. Abbot ’06 (that’s 1906) is going to be terribly embarrassed by his chess defeat at the hands of A. Breese of Yale in November of 1904, particularly given that the Harvard team won out in the end. The great great grandchildren of Joseph M. Cromwell are not quite as fortunate however—it’s now a matter of easily-searchable public record that their forebear was arrested for stealing a gold watch from Weld Boat House after being expelled from the law school in 1893.

It’s easy, though, to wonder: so what? Does this information have any value to anyone apart from for voyeurs and curious genealogists? Well, maybe. Mr. Cromwell’s reasons for the theft are buried in the fog of history, but it seems possible that had someone told him right before he committed the misdemeanor that it would be the subject of newspaper articles over a century later, he’d have thought twice. The ever-longer memory bestowed upon us by the Internet certainly adds an additional cost to the prospect of committing a crime.

There are also dramatic implications for those of us who write—and I don’t just mean those with newspaper columns. House open lists, course discussion forums and Facebook profiles are all public or semi-public records, and all are likely archived to varying degrees, either by Google, by the powers that be at Harvard, or by others inadvertently. How long will it be before some of our children are high school students with Facebook accounts of their own? Will we be their friends? Will our spring break pictures be visible to them?

Of course, we shouldn’t and won’t stop using these features, though the conscientious among us might start removing (or at least de-tagging) particularly licentious photographs once we enter the work force. But do we have any other sorts of obligations? Should I, at the beginning of this column, have refrained from suggesting that my grandchildren will go to Harvard for fear that they’ll be offended or upset if they read it and don’t get in?

That much, I think, is a personal choice, but it’s one we should know that we’re making. We’re just coming to terms with the idea of the Internet as a megaphone, taking the things we say and making them ten thousand times louder, capable of being heard around the world. A poorly worded letter to the editor or a heat-of-the-moment, too-ambitious argument on a mailing list can shut the door on a nascent political career. That it’s a megaphone in time as well as in space is harder to internalize, though, particularly when we mean time in a broader sense which spans generations.

But it’s a phenomenon that’s here to stay. So as we write and publish and speak our minds, we shouldn’t forget the lasting impact of our words. Court records, news stories, and senior theses all may soon be under Google’s watchful eye. At the very least, when we say things, as I have in this column, which may be seen by those to come, we should consider those who will be most affected. To my grandchildren, then, if you haven’t been admitted to this fine institution, my apologies—but wherever you are, you should know you have my utmost support. Unless, of course, you go to Yale; in that case I’m writing you out of my will.



Matthew A. Gline ’06 is a physics concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Tuesdays.