We all know what it feels like to live in the here-and-now. It’s one of the few things that every single one of us is qualified to do. You don’t need a history degree to perceive the drama of the Late Night Television Wars, because we’re all around it. The elements of culture are like air. They just are; you don’t need to pay attention to it.
But in a great Financial Times article, What Objects Say About Our Times, Simon Schama begins by wondering how future generations will understand our present.
A 24th-century digital archaeologist peers back through the murk of time to the early 21st, seeking, amid the welter of sounds, images, objects, the perfectly emblematic object or personification of that remote and fevered time. Such a symbol, she assumes, must be an image or an artefact, for no one except antiquarians could imagine that ancient screeds of print could have anything to say about the epoch now known as DigiOne.
Is this how a CD-Rom will seem to people in 300 years?
I eat stuff like this up. It’s no end of fun to wonder about how the future will look back on us and the time that we lived. We have a bigger problem when it comes to future issues and that is data integrity. Most of what we’re producing right now is ephemeral. That CD you burned your family photos onto will last for a hundred years or six months, whichever comes first. That’s crap-shoot territory.
As an aside, I have to point you toward this really cool episode of A Life Well Wasted, where the host looks into the world of collectors, preservers, and digital archivists.
It’s very intriguing for those of us who are going to be poorly explaining what it was like to grow up during the birth of the PC revolution.
Back to The Future Past
Schama’s piece brings up an interesting question regarding just how valid our conclusions about civilizations are. In particular, though, he talks about this within the context of our stuff. We like to think that we can study a bunch of objects and figure it out, but is that really the case?
The answers we get from objects, then, depend crucially on the questions put to them. The danger is using them instrumentally, as validations of prior notions – derived from other sources – of what this or that period might have been like.
We see a mummy and we think we know something about the Egyptians. I’m simplifying, of course, but there is a profound lack of context in even the most detail-oriented studies of history.
You mined the nuggets from the rockface of the archive, offered them up in a learned journal with only the most minimal editorial gloss. But, of course, the documents – no more than a rood screen or a Celtic Bible – do not tell their own story. We historians put voice into them. We are the ventriloquists of the arbitrarily preserved remains of time.
I could go on, but it’s better to read the piece yourself, because nothing I say is going to do justice to it. If you care about our attempts to understand the past, there’s a lot of meat here. Thanks to the fine folks at 3 Quarks Daily for pointing this article out.
