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History Will Not Judge Social Media.

Posted by Anthony LaFauce on March 28th, 2008 11:00 AM

Like many of you I have been amazed by the news I read today of historians being able to reproduce a sound captured on paper from 1860. The play back was digitally made from sound waves that were etched onto paper reals using an analog recorder.

I downloaded the MP3 and listened to the grainy sound from over a 140 years ago. I was floored. The thought of hearing a voice from so long ago made my brain begin to swim with ideas about what legacy we will leave. I must admit the outcome looks grim.

Sure the technology used to capture sound waves was primitive, but the analog cylinders have an advantage to all our digital technology; they are visceral and lasting. Think about every time your grandmother shared letters written by your grandfather or showed you an old grainy photograph; will you be able to do the same?

Heck, even old analog radio and T.V. broadcasts are still bouncing around in space. What of all our tweets? What of all our blogs and messages posted on forums? Unlike more primitive forms of communications all our new social media tools all depend on someone else to host them.

What of all your great ideas you have have shared on twitter, in a flick of a switch they are gone. All your Facebook applications will not work when Facebook shuts down. All your debates on political message boards, gone when they switch to a new server.

In 200 years no one will resurrect Myspace to see what all the hoopla was about. All of your comments and will be lost to the ages. All of your toils and all of your ideas will have no way of enlightening future generations.

All of this is just something to remember when while you are blogging or posting on a message board somewhere. All I am suggesting is that you keep journal somewhere or maybe just print your blog posts and put them in a box somewhere.

Am I wrong to questions the ultimate finality of social media tools and the digital world? Do you think the world will find a way to preserve all our efforts? If so let me know how you think they will do it. I would hate to see all these ideas and dialogs be lost forever.

Posted in Analysis
  

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 at 11:00 am and is filed under Analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Viewing 3 Comments

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    Interesting post. I've been reading The Black Swan and it has readjusted my whole idea of history. In it Taleb dwells on something he refers to as "the cemetery of silent evidence" - all the stuff that history has forgotten either because of the destruction or obscurity of the original artifact.

    Essentially, what you are worried about has always been... we always have lost and always will lose bits of "us" as time progresses. The funny thing is that the future won't care... it will route around the loss and construct it's history based on what has survived. History doesn't represent truth or accuracy as much as represents our current perspective.

    I think at some basic level we all understand this and that is what drives the angst you're feeling. We all want to remembered as we are... we all want the truth of this whole thing to sustain. We all want future history to be as accurate as possible. Yet we know instinctively it's just not possible.
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    If no one else does, Google will archive al of this stuff and with storage getting cheaper and cheaper, most websites will be stored in multiple places, accessed years later and stored even more times. Whether they can link the stuff back to you personally is iffy, but the sentiments will be there.
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    Good post. I work with some digital preservation issues and I am always amazed at how little people discuss these topics. It seems that everyone is in this whirlwind of content creation and no one is think about content preservation. Even in the case of the files on our computers - we have no way of guaranteeing that they will be available to read (as in open) in 20 years. And you're right - what do we do about the stuff we don't even technically possess...?

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