No... the need to rewrite history. Back in Winston Smith's day, he (if memory serves me) had to rewrite old newspapers to eliminate records of things happening that contradicted the current status quo (e.g. old alliances with current enemies).... so that the record(s) show that the current enemy was always the enemy.
On an important level we have had this for ages too. Just look at the turn of the 80s/90s when Iraq, a former ally of the west, was demonised and made into the enemy, more or less overnight.
And so it happens, on a minor and unimportant level with normal vocabulary. To reflect the new buzz word of 'sustainability', we've been updating almost 100 pages on the website so that the term 'society' now says 'sustainability' (in context it makes sense, believe me).
So here's the question. Is that right? Should we change all previous references to the new term, because we can? It is easy online, after all, to change anything. You don't have to recreate old newspapers or publish revised versions of books.
Will this affect history? Will the ephemeral nature of the Internet mean that future historians, despite our enormous wealth of information at present, will be unable to find the 'truth' because it is so easy to change past documents online?
Probably yes... newspapers are going out of business. Everything is moving online.
So here's the next question: does it matter?
My gut feeling is that it does. In my simple example, it is of no consequence, but there are undoubtedly situations where organisations, people's names, events and other 'facts' are altered after the, ahem, fact... and where this is of public interest.
Should we, for example, have a bill of rights and responsibilities for anything online (from blogs to websites, tweets to vids)?
Again, my gut says that we should...but being unenforceable, there's no point.
So if you see this blog change at any point in the future, it is your memory that is faulty, for this blog is always constant. Even when it changes.
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