Mittwoch, 30. März 2011

History and Future

The headline seems like an anachronism. But what I often wonder is, how future generations will do research of our time.
Not much information about daily life will be available any longer, as bills, notes, etc. are either thrown away, digital and deleted after a while or technically no longer available.
So I think that future generations will have to research our time through secondary documents like films, interviews, discussions, recorded TV broadcasts of shows, etc. These formats are much more likely to be transferred into future technical formats.
This will be a very selective and for one without a TV set not very fitting way to get a real impression of our time.
Historians in earlier times often also documented their present time.
E.g. Venice did a great job in documenting their history in a way they wanted it to be remembered. With all the multitude of current material I still think that our time in future will be a badly documented time for real life activities. Politics and main events on the other hand will be well documented in news and film.
Blogs are a good way to write about current life, but their future availability in the long run is uncertain. Their multitude also makes them a hard kind of historical document. One also can drown in too much to research and their relevance, connections and backgrounds are unclear and mostly not further researchable.
Here only time will see, what future historians will make of our time.

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