Back in the 1900's... you know, the old days... people wrote stuff down. Now we type it out and put it online. Instead of writing letters to family members, we write e-mails or blog posts. Information is permanent in electronic form only as long as someone is paying to keep it that way. But I often wonder how this will affect future generations looking back on what will no doubt be considered the early days of the internet.
When you watch great documentaries like Ken Burns's "The Civil War", you see photos and letters, preserved in archives probably because loved ones at home were too attached to them to throw them out. But today if you get an e-mail, text message, or whatever from a friend, where does it go? How valuable is it? Information is cheap, if not free, both to share and to consume. There's so much out there, and yet so much of it is nothing.
Technology has created a world in which news and conversation travels at the speed of light. But as a result, we have no patience and don't seem to care about anything once it's off of our Facebook news feeds. But is old information past use? We're certainly interested in old letters from, say, World War II, but why is that? I don't offer any answers... only speculation that maybe it's because it's a window into something we weren't able to experience ourselves.
How will information be preserved for the future, and how will it be valued? I think it's fascinating. Imagine being able to go look at your great grandfather's Facebook page - to see hundreds of pictures of him, his friends, his new girlfriend, his wedding, his new baby... wouldn't it be amazing? Or is there so much information about everyone and everything now that it'd just be another page on the internet? Genealogy is fascinating because it tells us what we don't know about our ancestors, but what happens when there's nothing we don't know about them?
And if you knew that some descendent of yours, 100 years from now, would be looking through your blog, your profile, or your Twitter... what would you say? Will the 140-character peeks into your daily routine mean anything to them at all? By then, who knows what kind of technology they'll have... we've gone from phone calls to Facebook and Twitter in just over 40 years of the internet. It's easy to imagine that the future will be even more connected and hurried than the present is. But they're going to look back, just as we always have. What will they think of what we've got now?
100 years ago, people were barely driving cars and the world was a much bigger place, but 100 years from when I write this, our time will probably seem just as archaic. So, to anyone who might stumble across this in 2109: I program websites for a living. I push buttons on a keyboard to transmit information to computers. I learn by reading books and websites, and by listening to professors give lectures. I drive a car to go places, and have to pay to fill it with gasoline. For entertainment, play video games with a mouse and a keyboard. And when I get online and talk to everyone I know with one status update, I think it's pretty nifty. But I expect none of this will be at all familiar by then. I know this world as it is now, and as advanced as our civilization seems, I'm not sure I'd be able to handle the year 2109, whatever it brings.
