WHAT WAS THE FLU LIKE?
While I wasn't paying attention, the always-interesting anthropologist Grant McCracken has been enriching his website with new "Culture by Commotion" projects. One idea is what he calls the "Pepys Now" project, which encourages people to document common experiences that future readers wouldn't otherwise understand:
There is no shortage of diarists these days, not with billions of blogs on line. But will bloggers find immortality? No. This is not just because there are so many of us. The trouble is we assume the things readers will want to know in 100 years.
There are, for instance, countless blog entries from people experiencing the flu. But what history will care about are all the details that struck us as too obvious or banal to mention.
What the "flu" was like, what we took as "medicine." The "pharmacy" we got the medicine in. The conversation we had with that man in the lab coat. The advice we got from friends. What we wore while recuperating. What we watched on TV. What was illuminated by that faint light in the "refrigerator." The idea, for instance, of "comfort food." (What was it? What comfort did it give?) What we talked about on the "phone." What "emails" we wrote. What happened to personhood? What was it like to be us, as we lost momentum, as our affairs went into suspension, as our life began slowing to come undone. Where did the mind turn in this rare inactive moment. What fretting did we do?
In 100 years, the flu will be an exotic experience. (We read Pepys for his accounts of the plague; we know longer know what this was like.) Historians will hold conferences on the experience of sickness and curing. And they will consult our blogs mostly with unhappiness.
For the sake of future anthropologists, explain the flu! It's a fascinating proposal, if only as a thought experiment. Grant's full posting, worth reading in its entirety, does a great job of making the familiar strange and of reminding us how different the world will be sooner than we think.