Relics of the future

As a historian of science I am intimately familiar with how content that might be deemed too mundane in one age can become unimaginably relevant generations later. So when, in the latest edition of Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series of interviews, Steven Garrity said “I don’t think anything I’ve written is critical for future generations” it made me stop and think.

First, I do not think that statement is true. Second, I do not think there is any way to prove that that statement is true either. We will simply never know, and if history is any indication, whatever Mr Garrity has been writing is more likley going to be critical for future generations than not.

One of my most used archival documents in research happen to be letters. When I look at an old, unpublished manuscript, for example, there are letters one can trace that refer directly to that manuscript and help build a proper narrative about it. When, as historians of science, we try to explore beyond published scientific literature we inevitably look to some forms of correspondence. Today, nobody writes letters anymore¹ and the single, accessible form of lengthy, mostly personal, texts are blogs. In a sense they are the indirect descendents of one of the most historiographically important forms of comunication to exist. I should like to think that if Tacitus, Cato or Cassius Dio lived today they would be bloggers.

There are broadly two types of sources we identify when studying history: narrative sources and relics—or “traditional” and “überrest” as the German historian Johann Droysen called them. The former are things designed to convey something to future generations, like edicts and pamphlets and books and legislation; and they are to be viewed within the context of the sociopolitical, economic and other ideological standings of the person(s) who prepared or commissioned them. While they are interesting and valuable, they also clearly have a narrative bias.

Relics the other hand were not intended for future generations. They do not have a “transmission intent”. While they often hold true to the beliefs of the person producing them they tend to have little to no large-scale bias in recording history. They are also excellent records equivalent to oral history and can serve as both primary sources and secondary sources that are closer to an original event than subsequent scholarly literature.

Speaking of oral history, Mr Garrit has an example closer to home: CBC Radio aired archived interviews with his grandmother Mary Nantes about life in the 1930s and 1940s. What Mr Garrit is creating when he publishes on his own blog is hardly any different. If anything it is more comprehensive given the written medium.

Likewise Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series—where he interviews bloggers based on a common questionnaire—is a trove of information about blogging itself, about variations on a theme, and, if it goes on long enough, about the evolution of blogging as a practice. And because a couple of his questions look at the history of a blog and the creative processes of the person behind it, the series is already producing a flavour of written history.

Unlike diaries, which Steven Kagel classifies as a process of self-evaluation, personal websites are more instructive about society at large. And, as Kagel goes on to say, “any good writer makes the events of his record appear distinctive through his treatment of them,” so today’s blogs promise to offer an incredibly insightful view of contemporary society to people of the future, and not one view—as we are often used to seeing in historiography today—but the views of hundreds if not tens of thousands of people on common topics that together provide a wide-ranging set of perspectives with which to paint a highly reliably picture of society, events, ideologies, belief systems and human progress in general.

An important question at this point is what makes personal websites so important in an age where so much is being produced every day—every second. Newspapers, whether online or in print have their well-founded niche in history. Newer forms of communication, such as reels and stories, while being considerably harder to collect for study are also likely biased in part by being designed for communication². Blogs on the other hand—requiring more involved maintenance in the long run—are more reliable, built on more orthodox means of communication and recording of individual thoughts, and therefore more historically meaningful.

This perspective may change over time as forms of communication besides straightforward writing, voice recording, photographs and journalistic videos weave themselves into the fabric of society. But even when that happens, the existing value of written records is unlikely to reduce in the context of history.

So to answer Mr Garrit’s question, I think all blogs should be preserved. The future historian may compile critical editions of historiography drawn from blogs. Given the scale of content they may mine it using suitable technology or find it useful to produce a highly specific history of actual people from a region of the globe. The further back we look today, for example, we have to rely increasingly on narrative sources, historical records etc. to understand society, with disproportionately few—if any at all—personal content from which to “do” history. Blogs decisively solve this problem for future generations.

The other problem is how we plan to preserve these. This website, for instance, is a bunch of plaintext files. These are most likely to survive whatever technological shift comes in the future, regardless of corruptions. Database-driven blogs and, worse still, personal websites running on closed-source or proprietary formats of data storage, are the toughest to preserve. Neither is impossible, which is good news in the end I suppose.