Original?
I guess that, disregarding the proverbial chicken or egg question, everything
can be traced to a first source. From a scientific point of view, this makes sense.
But e-mail? Is it really possible to trace a joke,
as we might trace a meme, all the way back to a bored college student who had
a catchy idea and passed it on to his friends who then forwarded it to theirs
until it circled the globe? Walter Benjamin wrote about The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, and in this particular
case it's hard to find much meaning in the concept of having "the original
copy". But it's rather unclear whether with forwarded e-mail we're dealing
with art (perhaps process art, or some sort of participatory art?). It would seem
that in most cases, the best we can do is determine our own relationship to the
forwarded message - the first time we received it, for instance, or our
place in the hierarchy of the particular forwarded message that we've received. Seeking out an equivalent to "first cause" is, in this case, a lost cause.
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friend of a friend of a friend of ...