Borthwick opens his post with an extended quote from the opening scene of Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. That scene takes place on the balcony of a palace in Prague where the Communist Party chief, Klement Gottwald, is addressing a crowd. It's winter, and another high party functionary, Vladimir Clementis, takes off his own fur hat and places it on Gottwald's head. Kundera notes that this was:
a crucial moment in Czech history – a fateful moment of the kind that occurs once or twice in a millennium.Photographs of the speech were distributed widely throughout Czechoslovakia, but four years later Clementis was denounced as a traitor and executed ... and in classic Soviet style, was airbrushed out of the iconic photograph. Kundera notes that:
All that remains of Clementis is the cap on Gottwald's head.Though this is a wonderful story, I have to admit that I'm not really sure I understand how Borthwick sees it as an example of the stream that he then introduces. Not that he doesn't try. Toward the end of his piece he writes:
The activity streams that are emerging online are all these shards - these ambient shards of people's lives. How do we map these shards to form and retain a sense of history? Like the hat objects exist and ebb and flow with or without context. The burden to construct and make sense of all of this information flow is placed, today, mostly on people. In contrast to an authoritarian state eliminating history - today history is disappearing given a deluge of flow, a lack of tools to navigate and provide context about the past.
I get the basic idea, but I guess I've always thought that the burden of making sense of the flow of information was always placed on people. The stream may be different, but the burden remains the same. What's more, though I love the Kundera story, I'm far from convinced that the historic contrast Borthwick raises really tells us much. Soviet-style rewriting of history is an interesting exemplification of the non-staticness of information, but surely there are other, less extreme, examples of this.
There is, however, another interesting point here. Both the original and the airbrushed photographs are still accessible, and even a casual view of them raises an interesting question:
Maybe he simply misremembered the hat episode. He was living in exile, pre-internet, and presumably didn't have in his possession a photograph that the government had censored 25 years earlier. (As Janet Malcolm put it, "The fact that all writers constantly make mistakes of fact and transcription is attested to by the professions of proofreader and fact checker.")It's a good story, whether or not it's fully accurate, or even truly connected to the issue of the stream.