Dating stories

This post will likely be nowhere near as exciting as the title suggests, although in doing a bit of research, I did come across some interesting dating stories that lead me to believe my own dating life may not be as disastrous as it could be. For example, I have yet to compare firearms on a first date. Still, I have stories. I invite readers to any of the monthly Campus Club Thursday happy hours to (potentially) hear them.

Point being, it turns out using "dating stories" as your search term when looking for information on the philosophy and guidelines of including a date when publishing a story online does not get one the information most relevant to the topic. It did however, provide about a ten minute, very entertaining detour. The Internet is full of detours.

I may be in the minority here, but whenever I see a story online without an accompanying date, I'll usually immediately backtrack and look for one with a chronological anchor--there's almost always a second source, and usually many more. Of course, the relevancy of a date varies with the content--whether it's topical, for example (news stories and releases always include a date), or in the case of academics, whether it's inclusive of the latest research.
 
Lately, I've noticed that, more and more, dates are being left out of stories published online. The thinking behind not including a date, presumably, is that you want to get as much life out of a story as you can before people think it's obsolete--therefore, if people aren't sure when it was published, they can't be sure when it becomes obsolete. And we all know that what you don't know won't hurt you.
 
But in this case, it's hurting the content producer when I don't read what they'd like me to see. The plan to give it more life backfires and gives it less. Again, I could be in the minority here, so do let me know your thoughts.
 
Write timeless classics
The simple way around all of this is, of course, to write something that is absolutely timeless. The poem "Ozymandias" comes to mind.

The temporal truth is that certain stories require a date, and certain stories may not, but to me, as in dating, there's no sense hiding your age. If you're looking to extend the life of a story, use other means, like referencing the story in later stories, repositioning it in another publication, or ideally, by making it really interesting so that people want to read it again and again--not by leaving it floundering in the land of unsureity*, which isn't even a word so far as I know, which makes it even less sure of itself, so now I'm really not reading it.
 
Maybe dropping the date is just a part of web culture. Blogs, for the most part, want to be the first and the fastest, and people want what's new, right now. Online, you navigate quickly through a near infinite variety of content, and as such, maybe it's the very nature of the online world that's led to the dismissal of dates--we have so many options, after all--maybe we just don't care from whence or when it came. It's here, now, and available, so what the hell. There's plenty of blogs in the sea.
 
I'll tell you what though...I still like a good date. Just like I prefer a book where I can get the copyright right up front, before we (the book and I) get too involved. After all, I'm going to be taking that book to bed sooner or later, and I want to know whether or not it's obsolete. With any luck, it'll be timeless.
 
*The land that time forgot was taken as a metaphor, and so I created my own--the land of unsureity--soon to be a major motion picture.