Escape Characters

Recorded for posterity

I am not famous. I have no celebrity. I'm some dude, in Alaska, living a pretty normal, statistically conforming life.

That said, I have my occasional delusions of grandeur.

There's a scenario I like imagine at times that someone, at some point long after I'm dead and gone, will somehow stumble across my computer files, various accounts, figure out the intricate series of passwords, puzzles, and insane file structure, and find something interesting there. Why? Well, they're potentially historical documents. Historical figures, in my not-so-vast historical experience, while often perceived through the parts they play in some pivotal events, have their personal lives discovered from the letters written to and from them over the course of their life. I'd think, if I were a biographer, that if I were trying to get a sense of someone on a personal level that their correspondence with their friends, families, and colleagues would be the first place I'd look. And I would think if I was getting the same treatment, my computer would be a biographer's first stop.

I always thought that what few letters we did read were the more interesting part of history class that they never seemed to get into. Yeah, whatever, Benjamin Franklin did all this great stuff, helped to start a country, and supposedly was a generally awesome dude, all historians seem to agree. But we rarely if ever really get a chance to see much of a personality from the highlight real of his life, just another face on a timeline to memorize.

I guess I was more interested in the more comparatively mundane in the hopes of maintaining a waning interest. Letters to their cousins about visiting next spring. Asking about family members, telling about goings on, the parts that I could more easily relate to rather than seeing them as their larger-than-life historical portraits. Then maybe it would have given me some answers to questions about the context of their greatness: the society they lived in, the people they interacted with, the things that the history books fail to cover, or, just cover poorly. I wanted a story, you could say, a narrative, in a form more than just a string of names, dates, and places. Those letters, I imagined, held that kind of a story.

( As an aside, I will say that I still learned lots of fun and awesome things during history. For instance, the worst health problem among people in the early 1800's? Constipation. For how much meat and starch those people ate, it was practically an epidemic. )

Also, being a language nerd, in the same way you look at Shakespeare and wonder if people actually talked like that in Elizabethan times, I looked at the letters and wondered what was different about the way people communicated back then. What was so foreign, it seemed, was that incredible amounts of time were spent writing, developing, and drafting any correspondence, indicated by the depth of language and sheer length of the letters. For instance, can you think of any letter you've written that'd been longer than two pages? Three? Maybe it was because the cost of delivery was so dear or that the messages were so infrequent that warranted the seemingly herculean effort spent writing the letters. Maybe people were just a good deal more literate, or English a less maniacal language some time in the past.

All this to say, when my future probably-not-existent biographer comes by my emails, I hope that they maybe wonder the same thing. Or, at the very least, appreciate the amount of time I spent writing them. And believe me, I spend a lot of time writing them. I'll venture that I spent as much time writing emails over the course of the week as I do writing here, given quantity of emails and how frequently I answer. I do this because I feel that it is important to be clear, concise, and to have a message worthy of being conveyed, otherwise the message is, in the eyes of those you're communicating with, and with the communicating world at large, rendered noise. Noise is filtered. Noise is ignored. And noise, by definition, is irrelevant to the signal being transmitted.

I'm perhaps overly sensitive and compensating in the area of written communication for the fact that so often I have difficulty getting ideas across when speaking. I have a quiet voice that I'm told "is lost in other sound," and have a problem with stuttering more often than not. Emails, article entries, text messages, IM conversations: I hold these things to a higher standard, a higher level of focus, because these mediums of communication are much less susceptible to noise and chatter and interruption. Rather than just sending out simple, date-and-time-and-place invitations to pick-up frisbee games, I instead write a few paragraphs, complete with word-play, logical progressions on various happenings in the frisbee world (why we changed locations, why we changed to Tuesday, etc.), and my best attempt at correct spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

And, as you can imagine, for all the time I spend, I sometimes get frustrated when others do not maintain the same level of effort. I fully realize: Not everyone is like me, nor would I hope they be. Not everyone spends the better part of a waking day in front a computer. Not everyone has jobs that rely on email, and clear and succinct expression of ideas and instructions through such media. Not everyone has time. And that is fine.

I do notice (and get the most perturbed by) what seems like blatant disregard for the reason for communicating at all (that is: To Deliver A Message). The whole reason I write this entry is because over the past couple of weeks, exchanging emails with friends, family members, coworkers, and anybody else coming across my email inbox, has been an exercise in restraint. Messages that are so convoluted that I can't figure out if I should buy Christmas gifts for family members, or if we're trying to simulate a Seussian Grinch Christmas this year. Messages trying to explain a problem with a computer, but over a text, and in such extreme shorthand that I can't even pick out nouns and verbs.

I call this an exercise in restraint because I want to shame the examples here, in nice, quote-blocked, italicized lettering. To bring it out for the world to see, to say, "Please, do not do this."

But then I realized that various friends and family members reading this may take offense. And stop talking to me at all. Which would not be great. Also, it would be arrogant as hell. "Look at me, and my opinions about language and grammar, when it's obvious from other writing that you make exceptions and even completely disregard rules all the time." That position is indefensible. As I mentioned, I'm nothing special. I just write a lot of email.

Instead, I want to say this: from here on out, whether you realize it or not, whether you intend to or not, everything you write in an electronic medium, unless you take great care to erase all evidence and backups and log files and storage medium that were involved in a data transaction (email, web browsing, whatever, etc.), it will be stored for a very long time. Historians in 20, 50, 100 years will have it easy, because nearly all of correspondence will suddenly be stored in massive machines that are designed to fail gracefully, have backups, and store data reliably for hundreds of years. Their only hurdle (and not a big one at that), is parsing formats, and getting access to the right accounts. I will even go so far to imagine that people, not just limited to historians, will make professions out of extracting usable, interesting information out of obsolete and archaic machine formats. I'm wiling to bet that natural language parsers will become more and more sophisticated as the years go on. And I'll venture that whoever creates these natural language machines will think to themselves, "Did the people during this time have better or worse language skills compared to those of previous and later times?"

Do you want to be part of a shameful low point when the spellcheckers come to judge you? What will your great-grandchildren think?