I've often written about the nostalgic streak of networked-archival media. Online social networks function as much as a repository of memory and past-presents as they do a flow of interminably new information. Two stories have arisen recently that underscore this nostalgic impulse, especially as it relates to another bastion of nostalgia: war.

The first is WW1 Experiences of an English Soldier. The blog is run by 59-year old, Bill Lamin, whose grandfather sent regular correspondence from the front lines of World War I. Mr. Lamin posts the letters, occasionally along with scans and non-diegetic commentary, in order and on the correctly corresponding date (albeit 90 years later). The letters themselves are what someone who watches the History Channel might have come to expect from war letters: sending love to the family, descriptions of the horrors of the trenches, and details of the daily life of a soldier.

It is this combination of shifted temporality and documentation of the quotidian that make this blog project an exercise in nostalgia. However, it is not simply nostalgia for the early 20th century and its culture, nor for the lost medium of the hand-written letter - rather, it is a nostalgia that arises from the displacement of the past into the present and an implied future. The medium of blogging assumes a state of constant modulation and addition. Each post is expected to be pushed down by another. There is no concept of "the end" to a blog, it just keeps going. Lamin has taken this chain of correspondence (what we might call an indexical representation of the past) and has displaced it into the ever-future presentness of a blog.

This is a form of nostalgia that is quite different from the restorative cultural nostalgia that has been the seed of many past wars. Instead of using a simulacra of the past as a substitute for the present and future, what we see here is a blunt engagement and juxtaposition of the experienced present and future with the experienced past.

The second blog I want to discuss is the final entry of Andrew Olmsted. This is a very different example of nostalgic new media. Mr. Olmsted was a soldier in Iraq who documented his experience in his blog - the best contemporary comparison to letter writing. The final entry, however, was put up by a friend of his, but was presumably pre-written by Olmsted in the case of his death. The entry itself is loaded with wistful quotes and heart-aching passages of Olmsted's craft. Yet, what I find interesting is the recognition of the blog acting as a surrogate for the blogger himself:

"I write this in part, admittedly, because I would like to think that there's at least a little something out there to remember me by. Granted, this site will eventually vanish, being ephemeral in a very real sense of the word, but at least for a time it can serve as a tiny record of my contributions to the world. But on a larger scale, for those who knew me well enough to be saddened by my death, especially for those who haven't known anyone else lost to this war, perhaps my death can serve as a small reminder of the costs of war."

The entry perhaps sheds light on one of the most nostalgic elements of blogging. It is a medium that exudes the present in the past and implies the future in the present. We read entries in terms of speech (note the common use of "rant" in many bloggers' self-descriptions) that we are engaging with in real time. Thus an entry like this is exploiting the continuous present-tense of the medium to fulfill the nostalgic's mission: envision or recreate a past that has the ability to act in the present and future. Readers are going to Olmsted's blog now as a memorial and memory archive, as well as to experience him as they might in the present.