"The Decaying Web..." What it means for our generation.

"The Decaying Web and Our Disappearing History" is a news article on the internet, more accurately, it is about people and the internet. This story on the BBC discussed social media as a form of historical documentation and how this information is vanishing at an astonishing rate. The article brought up some very interesting points about how data-- documents-- are decaying, in a sense, and the consequences for future historians. That is to say that our generation will essentially be undocumented.

While many private companies control the data that now encompasses so much of our social lives, I wonder if there will be issues the will stem from this. For example, many private companies that run these sorts of services (Twitter, Facebook, Google, etc.) might experience issues accessing information due to potential legal issues. This is one issue that does not even account for the physical problems of storing the information (size/storage capacity limitations, new users vs. inactive users and which one takes priority, and so forth.). Which information will they keep? Whose information will they keep? Why will they keep it? Or should we as public historians begin documenting the internet? Looks like it is time to start printing our emails and Facebook messages.

Here are a few paragraphs from the end of the article:

At the heart of this lies what you might call the paradox of ephemeral communications. Their instantaneous, insubstantial ease is perfect for sharing and debating the most important questions of our time. But it also breeds a newly knotty historical problem – because all this sharing and debate mean precious little, in the long term, if you don’t also know what people are talking about.

With not only diaries and letters but even the relative permanence of email starting to look like something from the last century, it’s a problem that is only going to get more acute. There’s much to celebrate in the power and inclusiveness of new media. Historians researching early 21st Century life from the year 2312, however, will have their work cut out for them – and find that their chances of success depend disproportionately upon those private companies who own so much contemporary social history.

Our descendants will surely be grateful for a record that reflects more than marketable data and consumer preferences. As to preservation, though, the problem may be intractable. Between private profits, the privacy of personal histories and our hunger for perpetual renewal, “history” itself may be a concept ripe for rethinking: not so much the objective sifting of sources as a living thing, perpetually remade across networks for which there’s no time but the present.

Just some food for thought.