How will this Internet age affect future historians?

Great Debates
1

Historians today have a lot of written records to go by. Documents hundreds of years old can still be legible today. But as time progresses, hard drives being mechanical devices subject to failure, will all the information on-line today be available to the historians two or three hundred years from now?

Or will historians of the future suffer from a relative lack of information, as computer hardware failures cause the information to vanish.

The trend in this day and age seems to be eliminating books and paper. It takes up space; it kills trees. Maybe they will never be totally eliminated; maybe they will be.

If we get to the point where we are totally paperless, what do you think will be the result?

2

I have a feeling, that barring some sort of major cataclysm that would wipe out digital storage, being a historian in the future will be much like today, except that instead of researching dusty old books and interviewing dusty old people in far flung lands, and having to learn other languages to do your research, it’ll be interviewing people via the web, having books automatically translated, and most importantly, being good at searching databases and search engines.

Instead of being a matter of finding scant information and piecing it together and drawing hypotheses, it’ll be more of a matter of winnowing the grain from the chaff, and only then trying to piece together what actually happened and drawing conclusions based on that.

If there’s some kind of cataclysm and collapse of civilization, there’ll be a big blank period where the paperless society was, unless that data is persistent and translatable.

3

I assume future historians will overemphasize the role of cat videos and porn on the functioning of civilization based on their digital footprint. As time passes hardware should become more durable, cheaper and larger. As that happens it becomes cheaper, easier and more reliable to back info up. So it shouldn’t be a big problem.

4

I don’t think this is a serious concern at all. Significant things that are on the Internet are generally stored in dozens of servers all over the world, not just one or two. The entire ouevre of Wikipedia, for example.

I think bigger concerns are:

  1. Balkanization of the Internet - companies (Facebook?) carving out their own little patch of the web, and managing to effectively shield their consumers from the rest of it, like AOL did. That means less replication of data and less of the safety-in-numbers thing I mentioned above.

  2. Device/software compatibility - making the reasonable assumption that the Internet will be superseded by other global networks and data repositories over the next, say, 500 years, will future historians be able to access whatever’s left of it? I mean, we wouldn’t understand hieroglyphics if not for the Rosetta Stone. Image trying to translate a programming language.

  3. That brings us nicely to the language barrier. We know a lot more about the development of language over the last 600 years than we do about it for the rest of human history, largely thanks to the printing press. It’s possible that electronic storage will mean extant languages never really “die out”, but it’s also likely that they will evolve much more quickly than before. I suspect that other than a brief spike when Shakespeare was around, we’d added more words to the English language in the last 20 years than we did in any hundred year period before that.

5

Whats really fun is to read Wikipedia’s emergency plan if all of the sudden an astroid is coming to earth or a super volcano is about to explode. I can’t seem to find it right now, though, if anyone wants to lend a hand.

6

Found it: Wikipedia:Terminal Event Management Policy - Wikipedia

7

I already know historians who have encountered these problems, specifically dealing in biographical studies of artists. (I mean “artists” in the broad sense – writers, musicians, etc. as well as visual artists.) When they go looking for documents from the 1950s or 1960s, they find oodles of stuff, often saved both in personal collections of papers and in various archives.

But I know someone who was recently working on an artist who died only a few years ago, with a career spanning much of the late-20th century. Suddenly, there were huge gaps in correspondence popping up starting in the mid-1990s, because everything was handled by email, and it hadn’t been archived anywhere. (At least not anywhere in his personal collection; I suppose some future historian might find some of it in some server archive, if they ever get access to such personal documents.)

And, in reply to those who just assume stuff will get archived, some early internet stuff has already disappeared – heck, even stuff from recent years. Look what happened when GeoCities shut down in 2009. Suddenly, 15 years of user contributions to the internet was taken offline. A few projects engaged in last-ditch efforts to try to archive as much as they could, and apparently the Internet Archive got a lot of stuff, but that’s just one (big) example. There are so many smaller services and sites that have disappeared over the years, probably without a trace.

On the other hand, of course, there will still be loads of crap to sift through. The issue, from my perspective, is more about personal electronic documents, rather than public ones. Even if the data is preserved on some server somewhere, will future historians be granted access to data that was one password-protected? My guess is that, at least for the next couple decades, a lot of that data will just disappear from servers and archives before legal hurdles and other issues are dealt with to preserve and ultimately allow access to such stuff.

Another interesting issue that historians already deal with in the digital age is the loss of drafts. People who study writing or music composition or other such artistic endeavors often learn a great deal from looking at drafts, which in the past were often handwritten or at least typewritten. These days, a lot of writers and composers just correct files on the screen as they go, and we have no record of the creative process.

Of course, in the past, there were always people who burned their drafts or papers in general. And in the distant past, we rarely have any of those records. But for people doing recent biographical history, the 1950s is often much richer in surviving accessible personal documents than the late 1990s.

I think ultimately many of these problems will be dealt with, but future historians will probably note an interesting gap in certain kinds of resources beginning in the 1980s or 1990s and going for a few more decades into the future.

8

Actually, all of what was once GeoCities is still available at oocities.org. I was somewhat surprised to find my resume, the only thing I didn’t delete from my GeoCities page in 2002 (I left it up as sort of a backup in case I found myself at an interview without a copy), still there last year when I looked to see what was left of my page.

9

I’m pretty sure the ceylons aren’t going to give a shit about human history.

10

I think you mean Cylons. Human history is probably pretty big in Ceylon.

11

I don’t think we’ll ever get there, but it’s a good question. Part of the answer is that the government (in this case I mean the US government, but I assume many do similar things) DOES back things up using hard copy in underground storage. I remember doing a tour of Iron Mountain and being amazed by the storage and what all is down there (it’s not just the US government either…many private companies also have space down in those and other vaults). So, even if every bit of electronic data goes away, I think that this will be one of the brightest ages of data for future historians, with huge amounts of data available.

And that presumes our civilization ends and our technology dies. If it doesn’t, then the wealth of data available to future historians will be unimaginable. Systems are actually getting more reliable, and more distributed, with information being literally global. As the technology gets cheaper, more and more of the everyday things will be archived for longer and longer…possibly indefinitely. There is a good possibility that a hundred years from now (or longer), people searching for information could come across this or other threads from this or myriad other message boards and read the every day, often banal or mundane thoughts of folks like you, me and the other folks participating in this thread. That’s something that is incredibly rare in history…the every day correspondence of people who are, well, just folks…not anyone important or earth shattering, just every day people simply talking about stuff that they find interesting or fun to talk about.

12

That’s a good one, sir!

I think everything is going to be further digitalized in the future, and all kinds of historical information will be accessible easily by every human being, just like out search engines now.

If shit happens, then there isn’t going to be any human to read any of that history we may want to conserve.

13

That was what I was getting at- rather than having to laboriously track down fragmentary records and references from the distant past, future historians will have the exact opposite problem- they’ll probably have so much at their disposal that being able to intelligently and effectively winnow it down to the most pertinent documents and archives will be what marks a good one from a bad one.