Digital artifacts?

The peculiarities that accompany blogging have struck me repeatedly since beginning this. Since my last post, which touched briefly on some of the effects of technology, I have been thinking about the interesting relationship it has with information.

I doubt we have any readers this dedicated (obsessive), that they frequently peruse the blog as a whole, but if such a person were to exist they would probably note minute changes occur frequently. This is because I am compulsive and always believe that it could be a little bit better, slightly more polished, more articulately phrased or artistically laid out. In the past I have gone through phases where I kept a journal or diary (usually I would write compulsively for a week or two and then stop). Every edit, change in word choice, misspelling is evident on the page, layered, as the revision was written over it, while the margins are filled with doodles providing a more accurate view into what I was thinking and feeling. These journals are actual artifacts, which could be studied and mined for information (I am not sure what would be discovered except that my younger self was very strange, but it is the nature of the medium and not the content which is the point). When I make changes on the blog, all you see is the new finished product, no evidence of the process behind it.

I do not believe that books will eventually die out and everything will become digitized but it is interesting to consider the possibility. Books, and the information they contain, can be lost or destroyed--just look at the library of Alexandria. However, a book itself is static and cannot be altered without the creation of a new entity. If everything were converted to digital media there is no guarantee that information remains constant. It almost seems like the perfect Orwellian plot-information kept in such a way that it could be constantly, subtly manipulated. Kind of like this blog. . .