Arther recollects the emails he sent and received on 9/11 but did not retain. It reminded me that I have lost or, recently, abandoned sets of email three times. The first was an error of cleaning up a hard drive, the second was turning off an intranet and the hird a deliberate closing of an account. Like this blog, each had thousands of notes and conversations from many, many people. As information it was great stuff, giving the ability to trace an argument over months, to track how a project developed but it was also a bit of a millstone focusing importance on the past as well as the flow and the source. It was authoritative but in relation frankly to mostly low grade content and gave too much weight to what was rather than was would be.

I don't know why that resonates with the fact that I've come across an interesting couple of themes recently in that book I've been reading on the Anti-Federalists of 1787. Some of them thought two things were necessary for them to get their message across - anonymity and a free press. By anonymity they meant the ability to write under a pen name so that the readership would not be able to pre-judge through status. By a free press they meant one without commercial pressure from the Federalists, one where printers would print and distribute all pamphlets equally. In this way virtuous public opinion could be best generated:

Public opinion was even more crucial than it had been in any other republic. "In a confederated government of such extent as the United States" it was vital that "the freest communication of sentiment and information should be maintained." Centinal envisaged the public sphere of the print as an important means of cementing a nation together. Print afforded a means of achieving social cohesion without a stron coercive authority.

Ratification proved the danger of allowing the press to become a tool of a party or faction: the suppression of Anti-Federalist writing facilitated ratification in a number of states. Centinal complained that "the liberties of that coutnytr are brought to an awful crisis," for it was precisely the Federalists' ability to dominate the press that allowed supporters of the Constitution to isolate and "overwhelm the enlightened opposition"...

I don't know what the connection is between the emails of 2001, this blog and the press of 1787. This site has over 2000 posts and many more thousand comments. But I do not really treat it like an archive as I rarely recollect that I have written something before. It is also practically anonymous as I have met only a very few of you comment makers in real life. It is also one of millions making them as a group, like personal email repositories, practically inaccessible for any real purpose - so free and so available that they are unfunctional as tools for the advancement of ideas into the community for shared consideration and development. This is even the case of the so called A-listers - that notion spoken of in 2003 but not really much any more: people who thought they were important because of hit counts seemed to think that that would bring authority and a means to make change.

I will have to think about whether there is anything to this.