History was made by people who were not so fixated on their place in history. Some might have thought of how they would be remembered, and attempted to color their reputations toward that ends. But they did not declare their historical relevance preemptively to the extent that we do now. We are keeping so many records today that they lose significance to the future. Historical events only become significant by virtue of our ability to forget everything else. We now memorialize so many things that none will be remembered. The bar is raised, but the historical process is fulfilled.
Information glut has cleared the way for instant nostalgia. In the past, eras were named after they had passed, their significance taken into account with the perspective of distance. Today, we seek to name the smallest piece of history, to declare its importance to posterity before that posterity has even arrived. We declare fond memories of things as they are happening. We become nostalgic for the moment before.
Nostalgia itself is a myth, a fairy tale. Hindsight is not 20/20, it sees through prescription rose-colored glasses. We have chosen to forget innumerable details, any one of which could cast our memory in a completely new light. So nostalgia is the edited highlights of the event as we perceived it. We may not have even perceived the event accurately. Prejudices, assumptions, misinterpretations, incomplete understandings of circumstances, all these conspire to rob us of a true and accurate picture of the past.
In this sense, the new information glut is of benefit to future history. The history of today is composed of half-tellings of half-remembered stories, half-understood. Now that we are keeping such close track of our every day lives, it becomes easier and easier to construct a picture of ourselves based on more complete knowledge. The knowledge is still biased, but one hopes there is enough of it to allow us to piece together a more accurate view of what our stories are attempting to describe.
At the same time, there is a great deal of information being stored that is just plain wrong. Whether as a prank, out of spite, or from within delusion, there is at least as much false information available as there is of the usable kind. Fake science, irrational arguments, opinionated conjecture passed off as fact, the Internet is rife with these. Any future historian will have to be careful to keep this in mind or face the same pitfalls as we face now with our partial pictures of the past. Just as there was hardly anyone recording things before, now with everyone recording things, hardly anyone can still be believed.
There is very little to prevent someone from screaming into the cybervoid, no filter on what is said. All that can prevent someone is an inability to use a computer. This is an obstacle for a great many people, yet for others it is not an obstacle, despite their possible lack of personal status. A denizen of rural Bangladesh, for example, might not find it easy, or even desirable, to make their voice heard online. A penniless and homeless person in the US, on the other hand, can find a way to get connected, using publicly available systems.
This is just to say that, while the internet is set up so that only those of a certain privilege have access, there are also ways for those outside that group to find access as well. What this means is that most of the information being recorded is generated by a small minority of the Earth's people. This is also parallel to the problems faced by current historians: how to determine actual events based on the accounts of a privileged few.
Our relation to memory and truth does not actually seem to be changing, given these parallels. The change seems to be a question of degree, when considering the task of the historian. But when considering the role of information in our day-to-day lives, some pretty marked changes are occurring. There is so much information available so quickly that we are not required to actually remember it any more. We hold our beliefs and trust the specifics of our knowledge to the online databases which we access so carelessly. But when the misinformation I mentioned above becomes part of the underlying data, how can we hope to maintain the integrity of our very selves?
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