We often look back to sometime in history and think, What an interesting time it must have been to live in! I dont think the world has ever been as interesting as it is today. Its not just the sheer number of technological advances that are happening each day, or the plenitude of scientific discoveries being published as I write this; we as a society have changed. Today, more of us than ever are archivists. If you want to know what the day to day life of an ancient Greek or Roman looked like, you would have to rely on a few bits of evidence and quite a lot of conjecture. Were not certain how ancient Chinese was pronounced (there are even questions about the pronunciation of Latin during different periods of history). There are entire research teams devoted to figuring out how medieval recipes were made - and many things that were made by commoners are completely lost to time. When history was recorded in the past, it was seen through the narrow lens of the elites. With the internet, we have started to record so many small, mundane features of our lives. We Instagram our meals. People create vlogs on everything from cooking, to travel, to interior design, to their views on gender- and political issues. Facebook records are daily comings and goings. Tumblr captures our humour and the mundane, dirty, naughty aspects of our lives. Essentially, so much more of our world, our lived experiences, is being captured on a giant archive called the internet. Provided this lasts, or is saved in some other format for future generations, future historians and archaeologists will have to do much less conjectural work. They will have direct access to how we sound, what we do every hour of very day and what we think about what we do. Its really quite phenomenal. History today is, at least on one level, democratised. Each of us playing a small but crucial role in recording our world, our perspective for future generations. To me, this marks a change in global mentality which I think future generations will mark as another Renaissance or massive turning point in human history. Of course, not all the world is online, but a growing proportion of it is each day - and you will be surprised to find out how many people are online.
Posted on: Thu, 14 Aug 2014 06:51:15 +0000
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