Kārlis Vērdiņš’s Motorola pager; BaltcomPlus, Oto paging system. Used from 1999 to 2000. RTMM 240844

Kārlis Vērdiņš and the writer Ieva Melgalve, April 1999. K. Vērdiņš’s private archive

January’s Artefact of the Month – the pager of the poet Kārlis Vērdiņš – is an apt symbol for the transient nature of technology, vividly illustrating the way that texts sent electronically can disappear. This artefact is like a metaphor for a present-day phenomenon – the museum’s collection receives fewer testimonies of the correspondence and collaboration of people doing creative work, or of the act of creation itself.

It leads us to wonder whether future researchers will be able to observe creative processes in the same ways they have been able to up until now, basing their observations on correspondence between people working in the field of culture. In a video conversation, Kārlis Vērdiņš talked about the history of this pager, and what his relationship with technology was like back then compared to now, as well as expressing his feelings about recording, documenting and preserving correspondence for posterity. We were searching for an answer to the question of whether correspondence between present-day writers will be available to future researchers.

It is quite likely that not only future generations but also the current younger generation will require an explanation of what this “miracle of technology” was and how it worked. Before mobile phones became the principal channel for communication at the turn of the 21st century, some people used pagers – devices that could receive and transmit text messages, or receive and play back voice messages. The model on display is a one-way pager – it can only receive messages. With the termination of the pager communications network, the messages sent were lost forever.

In 1999, when Kārlis Vērdiņš started his studies in Rīga, his mother purchased a pager for him so she could communicate with her son. The messages were generally short in content: for example, “call me!” or “where are you?”. The owner of the pager could then react, making a phone call or writing a letter if necessary. Some of Kārlis’s friends had pagers, but they didn’t use them as much.

When asked whether it is essential for people to register and preserve for posterity what they experience, the poet reflects: “When I was a little boy, I kept a diary; I noticed that the entries were very sporadic. If something bad happened, I wrote it down; it didn’t reflect the good that happened, or what I was writing about at the time, or what my thoughts were, or what I was learning. If you’re going to keep a diary, you should document your entire life… But this is pointless. It is better when such written testimonies do not exist, only myths…”