Articles about tech blogging and death have been bubbling through the tech lifestream over the past few weeks.

Triggered by the passing of two prominent bloggers that may or may not be blog-stress related, the feeing that the news never stops has driven many tech bloggers (like Michael Arrington of Techcrunch) to sleeplessness and the complete abandon of their physical and mental well-being.

But they love it.

I do too. But from there my perspective diverges.

Recently, I discovered that emerging digital technology and nineteenth-century life were not only related but highly compatible. So I set using my life to merge them more explicitly together.

My first step happened in Bridgton, Maine at the Rufus Porter Museum. Porter roamed New England by foot throughout the 1800s, painting murals and inventing every kind of thing: the Colt revolver; the airship; Scientific American (yes, that magazine)! He also staunchly supported an American arts movement underpinned by non-academically trained, “everyday” people. In his work and writing he made no distinction between art and science, poetry and astronomy. The academic disciplines did not organize his work.

At the museum I read through two years of the recently archived Scientific American which he wrote and edited largely by himself. He worked hard and was incredibly productive. But sometimes, he just took off on foot for months. He ran through two wives and many children in satisfying his nearly century-long itinerant wanderlust.

Inspired by Porter’s unruliness, and despite the racist and sexist exclusions that his work implicitly espoused, I took my next step:

I sometimes live in the nineteenth century.

One day a week I go to 1866 or 1867 (depending on the season) and dress as a lower middle-class seamstress. That means seven layers of underclothes. I tend my fire and my needlepoint. I gather wood, iron clothes, and I talk to people about my life and worries. I also talk to them about how, despite 140 years passing, life was in many ways very similar to today.

Sometimes I’m so busy in my century I forget to eat:

In 1866, each family member four years of age and older had to rise with the sun and work all day and late into the night until they collapsed. This was what it took to live. It took a full week just to do the laundry from washed to pressed. If the food for next winter didn’t get planted and tended then the family would be in peril. On top of all that, my 1866 self would have to work making gowns for wealthy women in order to bring in money so my children could sometimes go to school.

How do I time travel like this? I volunteer at a living history museum. Tourists and school children want to pose in pictures with the “pioneer lady.” Many of the regulars come in to complain about technology today and the Internet. A perpetual comment is: “It used to be so simple. Now Internet and media are ruining everything!” So I show them a Goody’s magazine — the Vogue of the day — and explain that as a seamstress I would have had to study new magazine issues constantly for trends in sleeves and pleats. I describe the visiting and other social rituals that functioned much as Perez Hilton functions today. I describe everyday life.

Each day was a challenge. People died all the time because of choices made in their life. Genetics, class and chance were, of course, factors too.

My final step in merging my present and ever-present past? I’m still working on it. Tech news is always happening. My role models are people who have admitted that their success was achieved by creating a lifestyle that will end in “nervous breakdown.”

Healthy, unpredictable and successful tech-blogging role models are few and far between. I’ve had to go back two hundred years to Porter to find a good one. Ultimately, tech news is a repeating pattern. The content fulfills many needs: the market, leisure entertainment, social bonding. But revelation is not built into the pattern. Recording and spreading the facts of the day can be thrilling and energizing. Like hunting an elusive beast. But there is never satiation — only the simplistic grinding hunger for more, more, more.

I am not interested in just chasing a Web 2.0 dragon. After toiling away in 1866, it feels too much like déja vu.

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Posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 2:38 pm. Follow comments through the RSS 2.0 feed. Comment or trackback.