15th Century Version of Blogs, Facebook, and Twitter

We have been preserving our communications probably as long as we have been. From cave drawings to hieroglyphics to alphabets the world over, languages continue to evolve. Although I suspect many would say it’s devolved a bit since the advent of digital shorthand, IYKWIM (if you know what I mean, for those of us who prefer real words). And I thought LOL was bad. Pretty soon we’ll have nothing but a string of first letters to decipher. Still, I think I prefer that to the other type of internet shorthand where ‘you’ is written as ‘u.’ At least we’re getting the right first letter.

They say once something is out there in cyber space, it’s there forever. In fact last week’s episode of Criminal Minds dealt with that exact issue in “The Internet is Forever.” To interject for a minute, that’s another great show IMHO (in my humble opinion, while we’re on the subject of internet abbreviations) that thankfully has been renewed, unlike Law & Order. Since I first wrote about the cancellation of Law & Order, there have been reports that say it may yet see another day, albeit briefly, if creator Dick Wolf is successful. If interested, you can add your voice really easily by saying you ‘Like’ the Save Law & Order page on Facebook. A campaign that seems to be helping get the message across to the network. Hopefully there’s still hope. Interesting that both shows are also often associated with the CSI effect, just like NCIS, which actually helped that little boy save his sister last week.

All this just further points to the power of communication in its many forms. And while we know this has been going on as long as things have been going on, it’s a powerful thing to see everyday communications from 15th to 18th century England. The Scriptorium Project by the University of Cambridge, has released digitized versions of an archive of antique manuscripts including thousands of pages from 20 handwritten manuscripts or “miscellanies.” The unique thing about these pages however, is that they aren’t great works of literature or formal preservation of history, they are just ordinary scribbles of things people wanted to remember or make note of. Jotting down this and that. Musings if you will. A 15th century blog almost.

Among the scribbles are bad jokes, recipes, accounts, quotations, sonnets, prayers, legal tips and medical instructions. There’s even a weekly diet plan. Seems like not much has changed in 600 hundred years. Except I don’t think I’d be much of a fan of the food – “gruel, boiled meat for the lord or lady, puddings, or a calf head.”

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You don’t have to be famous to have something worthwhile to say, and just because you’re famous doesn’t mean you have anything worthwhile to say. With the internet, each of us has easy and equal opportunity to say and read what we wish, kind of like an extension of what those people hundreds of years ago had, when they jotted in their generational manuscript books.

It seems that thanks to this Scriptorium Project, the intentions of those original writers are alive and well. While I doubt they ever thought millions would have access to them centuries later, they were intended to be passed down through the generations. And through preservation of these fragile documents, and the digitization of them to ensure they are never lost, we have that on a grand scale. While what they had to say then, or we have to say now, whether any of that amounts to a hill of beans, it’s all out there now in cyber space.

Criminal Minds poetically quoted Google CEO Eric Schmidt, “The Internet is the first thing that humanity has built that humanity doesn’t understand, the largest experiment in anarchy that we have ever had.” For better or worse ramblings through the ages aren’t going anywhere. It also reminds me we’re all in this together, through time.