The Moving Finger

A little more on the Rubaiyat. Followers recall one of my sappy history stories about H. Perry Jones and how much he loved that quote. The whole stanza bears repeating:

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it

Tell me good readers if there is a more succinct expression of what is social media today.

Composed around the turn of the first millennium, it captures both the ephemeral quality of our daily digital lives -- how fast do those texts, Tweets, status updates, RSS, 24x7x365 news fly by.

But the close of the quatrain speaks loudly: Just like the Googleplex (and the rising data hydra that will be Facebook's new messaging), the moving data of social media digitally lives forever. Somewhere. On some server. And once you've said it and sent it, ah yes, "all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line."

No amount of undo once sent "wash out a Word of it."

Savor that. Harry Truman is right: The only things new in the world is the history you don't know.