OPENING SHOT
With swollen, foaming rivers of information roaring across the Internet, we flatter ourselves that the netting of relevant data is a recent skill -- as if the primeval forest didn't also offer an overload of information to every prowling hunter, for whom reading the sky, culling facts from the flutter of leaves, from the sound of snapping twigs, were essential abilities, certainly more significant than our talent at finding good local restaurants online.
We data dinosaurs remember a time when we periodically drained our lakes of information -- we flushed away old files, squeegeed off accumulated e-mails. Now, electronic storage capacity is so cheap that few need bother deleting anything. So it grows.
A shame, because having to dispose of something prompts you to look at it anew before consigning it to eternal oblivion -- or, more accurately, before making it harder to retrieve since nowadays nothing ever really goes away.
BERRY PAINT TO BUNCHED ELECTRONS
My mother phoned. "Do you know your voicemail at work is full?" she asked. "No ma," I said. I don't often phone myself at work, because when I do, I'm never there.
So I phoned my office.
"Welcome to Avaya messaging," began the mechanical lady's voice. "You have . . . two new voice messages . . . one hundred, twenty-three, saved messages. Your mailbox is full. You will be unable to send messages. You may wish to delete unwanted messages. Main menu . . ."
I "may wish?" I do wish! Let's get at them!
First the two new messages -- the anonymous angry guy who has been phoning at night for years. He marks his messages "urgent" -- the only caller to do so. Sometimes I delete his message right away, upon hearing that it is "urgent," pausing to savor the irony. Nothing signals a communication is meaningless as clearly as it being labeled "IMPORTANT! PLEASE READ."
Sometimes I listen to the first few syllables. "Mister Steinberg, you LIBERALS make me pu . . ."
Delete. God bless voicemail.
"Thank you brother Steinberg," a minister begins, citing a few minutes I took to speak to a young man under his care.
Onward, to the 123 saved messages, wondering what that first message will be. Like an archeologist with a toothbrush, working my way backward in time.
A retired cop; a Metra engineer; a man abused by a priest. The Taiwanese Economic and Cultural Office in Chicago. The Mormon Temple in Salt Lake City.
Delete delete delete. Most I saved for the phone numbers -- quicker than jotting them down.
A few dozen messages and we're back to the fall, and the election. A campaign manager. A senator's aide. The National Confectioners Association; the BBC; the Chicago Bears; a newspaper in Norway; the American Embassy in London.
The need to cull messages is a sign of our phone system's age. The e-mail pit, which once we were periodically hectored to dredge out, has apparently become bottomless, thanks to terabytes of storage. Or are we on to petabytes by now?
There are 32,765 e-mails lingering in my e-mail queue, and nobody seems to mind.
Back to voicemail. Some I kept as a record of the caller's remarks.
"The weapon was not registered, therefore it was illegal."
One was me, a nasal voice -- cripe, I do sound like Woody Allen -- caught without a notebook, calling my voicemail to read words from a plaque. A clever trick -- if I say so myself -- to have in your bag.
A surgeon. A public defender. Leon Varjian, the man who created the Pail & Shovel Party at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in the late 1970s, phoning from New Jersey.
Once this stuff is kept forever, will anybody bother with it? Scarcity creates value, and electronic communications' overwhelming quantity, coupled with its hasty, artless construction, will probably keep anybody from ever caring. Nobody is going to write a thesis on "Tweets of the Early 21st Century."
Or will they?
We haven't even read the stuff we've got. Most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read yet.
At least I think that's true. Better check.
"There are massive amounts of demotic papyri," said Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago. ("Demotic" denotes the common form of ancient Egyptian writing; it relates to the familiar bird-and-eyeball hieroglyphics the same way shorthand relates to block printing).
"It's the biggest single corpus of written records, because they used this stuff as packing for mummies."
Stein did not want to guess how much is still untranslated, and passed me to professor Janet Johnson, editor of the massive Demotic Dictionary, which the institute has been assembling for the last 40 years.
"Twenty years ago, I would have said that only 10 percent of all fragments have been read," she said. "But in the last generation, an inroad is being made on the backlog of unpublished things. Work on demotic is really moving forward."
While I had her on the phone, I asked: How's the dictionary coming?
"We're on the last three letters," she said. "We hope to be done in two years."
We'll check back then. Meanwhile, the first voicemail was no forgotten complaint from Barack Obama, as I had hoped, but a Canadian lawyer offering a speaking engagement. Eventually the voicemail was scrubbed clean, and offered words I took unexpected pleasure in hearing:
"You have no new messages and no . . . saved messages. Main menu."
TODAY'S CHUCKLE
From Alicia Brandt:
The technological advance I wish I could get is an addition for my answering machine: a Get-to-the-Point button.
Photo: Ben Curtis, AP / If you think your e-mail and voicemail might be interesting centuries from now, know that most Egyptian hieroglyphics unearthed by archeologists still haven't been read.
