Slashdot Mirror
Will There Be Historical Records from the Digital Age?
magarity asks: "NPR's Morning Edition today aired a segment on the Medici Archive Project where every letter sent and received by the ruling Medici family of renaissance-era Italy is being stored. The interviewer, Bob Edwards, casually joked that it was a good thing the Medicis didn't use email or else all this history would have been lost. It is easy to predict that at a similar distance in the future little will be known about our time period. After all, it is already problematic retrieve 25 year old data from 8 inch floppies, simply because the reading mechanisms are hard to find even if the media has retained the data. The same thing will happen to CDs in 50 years. How should the dawn of the digital age be recording itself for history, especially casual correspondence that gives insight into day to day life?"
"The Medici Project concerns itself with the rulers and given the recent report of US Congress members not making use of email one assumes they are still using good old long term archivable paper. Will the President and Congress in 2030 or even 2020 feel the same way? The main problem being digital records are so much more easily tampered with compared to old paper. It's not as easy to do carbon dating or other such tests with a bunch of bits. Remember: the victors always have and always will rewrite history as much as possible."
A democracy, a so called 'free society', can easily be manipulated and controlled by the person controlling the information. What happens when all information, except what comes from 'authorities' is suspect because it is so easily fabricated?
It reminds me of the Arnold Swarzen...(?) movie, "The Running Man". He's a police helicopter pilot who refuses to shoot unarmed people involved in a food riot. The powers that be manipulate the video tape evidence to make it appear that he massacres the people instead. People are shown the tape and cry for his death in a game show type fashion until some revolutionaries are able to show the real tape by hacking into the communications channel.
The temporality of public records has very serious implications for our social structure. If the only record of your speeding ticket is an entry in a database, what happens when a glitch makes you a drunken sloth who doesn't pay child support. If the entry showing Bush's drug convictions get deleted, will there be no other record. Trust me on this, email is a politician's dream. Everything from here on has plausible deniability.
Aah, change is good. -- Rafiki
Yeah, but it ain't easy. -- Simba
"Important information survives (usually). Trivial information gets lost. This is how it should be. There's no reason to preserve every bit of data for 'historical' reasons."
I've worked on research projects whose primary source was day-to-day accounting records of a small business running in Egypt during the 11th century. The records were preserved in part because they were at the bottom of a trash pile. The records gave us a huge amount of information about everything from transport methods to the ability of the state to collect tax. Most of the 'important information' from that period which people though was worth preserving revolves around which ruler stomped which other ruler's butt. Our 'trivial information' gave us a lot of stuff which we knew nothing about before, stuff which helped explain why ruler X had the economic wherewithall to stomp ruler Y's butt and, well, more interestingly, what it was like to live under ruler X or Y.
The same applies today. Yeah, a record of what your family ate for dinner for the past two weeks is truly trivial. But what it will say about daily life, the transport of food, diet, cooking technology, food storage & a whole lot more about life in the early 21st century might be invaluable to some historian in a thousand years.
Your 'trivial information' is someone elses data goldmine and vice versa. One of the things I really like about computers is they allow you to keep a lot of personal shit you might otherwise have to trash because it gets bulky. The chances that I'll hang onto all my mail & all my parent's mail and all my grandparents mail is pretty good when it fits onto a CD rather than choking up my small apartment with boxes. The chances that some future historian will get to read ordinary everyday mail rather than just the mail of presidents and kings in a thousand years is getting better.
I'm at a loss to understand why this question is perceived as being difficult to answer. Notice the posting talked of the *ruling* class. Today we look back at history and see people who kept records of their letters. They are usually wealthy and upper class.
The analogy would be to read emails from, say, the white house in 200 years. Do you think the white house is saving their emails? You bet. Do we have lots of examples of (from the general public) letters from 200 years ago? Certainly not as many as there will be emails in the future. Usenet archives, digital backups stored in basements, most emails are being stored two or more times at two or more places. I don't quite understand why someone would think that just because it isn't on paper, it isn't going to keep. We are going to have far more emails stored in the future than we will know what to do with.
As society we think of ourselves as individuals to be pretty important, but lets face it, for the vast majority of us, no one is going to care in 150 years. With that in mind, the digital age is storing far more records than ever before and the future holds a new paradigm of historical record. I almost lament that I wasn't born 150 years after the advent of the digital age where high resolution movies will look as good 1000 years from now as they do today.
-Moondog
Of course the flip side of this is that it's not always possible to tell who will be considered interesting in the future. In many cases, the most interesting use of archives is to look at the work of interesting people while they were working their way up and weren't of broad enough interest to attract major attention. Nobody knew that a 25 year old patent examiner named Albert Einstein was about to become a scientific star, but because we have his personal letters we can find out what he was doing scientifically and personally.
You never know if the next great author might be posting his early, great works to some fan e-mail list because he can't get his foot in the door at a major publisher. Maybe the next great debator is getting started in flamewars on Slashdot. Maybe the next great OS designer is getting into arguments with established academics on USENET. Oh, wait, that already happened, and we can only read the argument because somebody though to archive it. Maybe the next great philosopher who will be mostly ignored for 100 years is already publishing his early thoughts somewhere on the web. You can't always tell what will be valuable to the future until well after the fact, so preserving as much as possible is still a really good idea.
A truly wonderful example of this kind of thing are the early works of JRR Tolkein. The early history of the Silmarillion is absolutely fascinating and a wonderful example of the development of a literary theme. That's a work that wasn't published for over 50 years after it was started, but some of the earliest drafts still exist. Because those drafts are available, it's possible to see how it developed. Will the same thing happen when authors write everything in Word and write over old versions every time they change anything? How about if they're still very careful about keeping copies of early drafts but the formats change so much that they can't be read anymore?
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.