To worry about history being lost because everythingis digital

[Trainbother]

So much of what we know about the past, especially about ordinary people, is because someone came across old letters or diaries. How does that happen when everything is on old or obsolete devices that no-one's looking at?

I recently came across a carrier bag of photos from late DH's military service in the 1990s. Very interesting, but they'd have been lost forever if they were on a phone or PC I didn't know about or couldn't access.

How will future generations learn the history of ordinary people? I know there'll be official records of the big stuff, but what about the rest?

I think it might be the opposite in some respects.

During my history degree I had to read 20k word articles on the inscriptions of the tombstones on ONE tiny graveyard (then the same professor would ask us to write an essay covering 200y of history in 1500 words...).

Historians of the future are going to be comparatively swamped, even if 99% is lost.

@ajdhpoqnavd
I get what you’re saying, but ultimately no storage medium or method of recording the past is perfect. How much of the day to day antics of those a thousand years ago do we know? Sure, some paper, books etc have survived but 99.9999% was destroyed /burnt/rotted away. There were no photos, videos or anything of that ilk, so Id say the future generations will already have the possibility for far, far greater insight into the past than we have right now.

If we, on a personal level, choose to store things in a way that can or can’t be lost is another matter, but I disagree with the premise that somehow our history will be lost. On the whole, it’s being recorded better than it ever was imo.

I think sadly younger people have very little interest in history generally. They are very much live in the moment, swipe through everything at 100mph etc. I agree that a lot of what is happening now will be “lost” but I think sadly no one will be looking for it either.

I think that's always been the case for the majority of people. Most of us aren't historians, but there are still young people studying history degrees today.

@Lonelycrab On the whole, it’s being recorded better than it ever was imo this is a prevalent and very misguided opinion, I can only say it really isn't that simple, and you only need to spend 1 minute googling to recognise how much of a wide spread concern it is, not by conspiracy theorists, but governments and heritage professionals.

@Lonelycrab unfortunately the storage medium is only part of it. There's lots of old computer tapes, laserdiscs (as in the Domesday project from the 80s), magnetic disks etc that are still in existence but that are near-impossible to read today. The hardware required to read them is obsolete and getting really hard to find in working order.
Once you do manage to get the data off of the media, you've then got to wok out what that data even is. All you get is a string of ones and zeros. Sometimes it's easy to work out what that represents. Sometimes, particularly if it's been compressed in an unknown format, it's virtually impossible.

That goes back to October 2004!

Would Anne Frank's diary have made it on, for example?

Yes, I believe it would, as the 2024 version of Anne Franks diary would quite likely have been uploaded to the Internet, just as this conversation is now. Or possibly stored on a device that would have had as much chance of being found as a physical, paper diary.

We will be truly forgotten after 2-3 generations have passed, like we never existed, even more so than in the past.

Anne Frank would have shared the diary of her family in hiding on the Internet?

What about messages from the front to loved ones?

I suppose Anne Frank and Samuel Pepys are so well known partly because their inner thoughts are so rare. Would we put that much importance on them if we also had 5000 other people in the same situations also writing diaries?

DH and I were talking about this the other day while he was looking through a box of his parents’ letters to each other. Our kids won’t inherit anything like that because our communication is almost all digital.

I think it’s easy to assume things will be kept just because we all store so much online. But storing things online takes energy (and hence cost)- who is going to pay for that when you’re gone? Why would they? Never mind the risks of technology becoming obsolete and other changes we can’t anticipate now.

It you want things to outlive you, have a hard copy.

Yes, I pay for iCloud to store my photos, that's not going to carry on after I've gone.

The thing is, it’s us as consumers of history, researchers of history that give it its meaning. When we come across something we decide how historically relevant it is and what it means in conjunction with whatever else we may (think) we know about the past. So Anne Frank’s diary may have the same prominence, it may nothing - there are many Annes that we’ve missed because documentary evidence didn’t survive. Oral history is a really interesting way of practising history and one that allows us access places we may not have been able to and cultures that are oredominantly orally based. We have broadcast now which is endlessly fascinating which people are using in their research. Perhaps we cannot preserve everything, but it’s self selecting in that way anyway.

Our way of approaching and practicing will change as it always has done.

This sounds so interesting. I'd love to work somewhere like that.

Anne Frank would have shared the diary of her family in hiding on the Internet?

I didn’t say shared, as in broadcasted it to the entire world at that moment. The point is, she would have recorded it that way, just as a highly personal email is recorded when you send that to just one person, or even yourself..or if that wasn’t possible, it would possibly have been stored on something that could have been read a few years into the future.

All I’m saying is, we actually have the ability, and technical means, to store stuff about our past probably better than we ever have done and it’s getting better all the time.

Yes, I know we can store it, but unless it's been officially stored for posterity, how will anyone come across documents that weren't considered important at the time, like finding a stack of letters in an attic?

In the Anne Frank example, her uncle found the diaries soon after the family were arrested. Would he have even looked on her laptop/phone?

A lot of ordinary folks stuff will just be non existent, lost in iCloud, other ones are available.

We'll be able to look back on cringe Facebook statuses fondly.

Or would he have been able to access the laptop and phone?

To everyone with photos in the cloud, let other people know what your password is.

So here’s a different perspective… I had saved a link to an article about 10 years ago. I just clicked on it for a presentation that I’m working on and got the dreaded 404 page. After about 5 min of searching on the site I found it again.

If this article was in print form I would have had to haul my cookies to a library, hope that the article was in a publication they had access at the time it was printed. I would have had to a a rough idea of when it was published. Then I would have had to search for it manually by reading through the publication.

Yes diaries and photos will be lost… just as they have been for millennia. I mean do you read a lot of first hand tales from linen or papyrus in your spare time? What about those cave drawings, not exactly readable after a flood or earthquake.

Just think of all of those letters and diaries that have been burned, flooded, or simply tossed in a bin.

This is a truly heartening answer!

I've often wondered about about this question too, and I'm glad to hear that all will not be lost!

If something obsolete is of importance, surely the hardware could be recreated - if it could be built in the 80s, why could it not be built now? It might be expensive, manufacturing individual parts rather than have them roll off a production line, but it must be possible.

There are lots of things that are technically feasible but that would cost so much you'll never get anyone to pay for it.
Plus you won't even know what's on a particular storage medium until after you've a) been able to read the data off it and b) been able to decode that data into something usable. And then you find out your fifty million quid research project has unearthed a Snoopy calendar for 1976.

I wouldn't have thought 'expensive' would be in the millions bracket. When the device was first invented, there must have been a prototype made as a one-off and it wouldn't have cost a fortune.