Facebook (if you haven’t heard) is the new phenomena. It’s writing our individual and community history. It’s not just our cultures history being recorded anymore about dates of wars and influential people; this is everyone’s life on display (with no privacy) out in the open.
History today is patchy. I never met two of my Grandparents and to be honest, I don’t even think I could identify them with the few pictures that remain. Going back further of course, I know nothing of my parents Grandparents. They could have been Chinese and African American for all I know.
Our future it appears will be unforgettable; categorized, numbered and easily searchable by date, location and event. And worst/best of all – we provide this information freely and without caution (I am the worst for it – hence you reading this blog).
Look at Facebook; you can Chart the relationships and interactions between everyone and their friends, view events they attend and of course, the pictures of the “good times” everyone had at that event. What happened that night? Just check the comments people left. We are writing our communities history online.
We will be able to know everyone who’s ever lived since the dawn of history — or at least, the dawn of the new kind of history that has just been born this century.
I expect to live long enough to be lifelogging (that’s a futuristic term you will hear more and more about in regards to recording your ENTIRE life – what you see, what you say, what your heart rate is, etc) my first thirty or forty years will be very poorly documented; mere gigabytes of text and audio to document decades of my experiences. What I can be fairly sure of is that our descendants’ relationship with their history is going to be very different from our own, because they will be able to see it with a level of depth and clarity that nobody has ever experienced before.
My Grandkids will know most of my doings from 21 and on. I have kept a patchy record of my life online and public online for 2 years. This information will still be readily available in 50 years; all of my pictures and all of my writings.
Imagine what your Grandkids will be recording in 50 years voluntarily and mandatory? The futures history looks entirely alien to our own.