The Future of History

(Random note: while writing this piece, I realized that "media" is the plural of "medium." Mind=blown)

Here's an experiment: Look through your bookshelf. How many items there are 10 years or older? Perhaps a few? A lot? Okay. How many will still be there 10 years from now? 20 years? 50 years? Probably most of them, if you're anything like me.

For the vast majority of recorded history, physical media has been the preferred medium of record. That is to say, if you had something important, or something to be remembered, you wrote it down, and you could hold it in your hand. You could bet pretty good money that it would be around for a while.

The examination of books, art, photographs, and other physical media from decades, centuries, or millennia ago gives us fantastic insight in to the nature of society from whence they came. This is made possible through the incredible property of physical media being able to preserve itself. That is, it has endured in spite of society's neglect, or occasionally even efforts to destroy it.

Now, to continue our little experiment: page through your computer's hard drive. How many files are at least 10 years old? Probably relatively few (unless you're a digital pack rat), but most likely because the majority of us didn't have our life centered around a computer 10 years ago, back when AOL was both the leading ISP and content provider on the web.

Finally: take another look at the files on your computer. How many of those will you still have in 10 years? How about 20 years? 50 years? Fewer than your books?

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The prevalence of the internet and computers allows people to create information at a truly unfathomable rate--worldwide, an amount of data equivalent to the size of the Library of Congress is generated in the order of minutes, if not seconds. Websites, articles, blogs, photos, and tweets are created and stored in the digital multiverse, all waiting to be retrieved for the foreseeable future.

But here lies the problem: when a library shuts down, the books remain. One can still go and retrieve the information contained in that building. The written word is, generally speaking, accessible to everyone, anytime. However, when a website (for example) shuts down, the information within is--poof--gone forever, unless someone consciously decides to retain that data in a usable form.

So, I propose my question: Given the increasing dependence on the computer and digital (not physical) media, what will serve as the historical record of our society? How will people centuries from now generate an account of what our lives are like, with so much of our world taking place in the world of 1's and 0's?