History in the future

On 9th November 2009 it will be 20 years since the Berlin wall fell and the communist experiment in Europe came to an abrupt end. It also marks the last major shift in world history before the internet took hold.

No blogs. No tweets. No millions of digital photos. Our vision of the event will be to stare back into an analogue world; a vision shaped by a professional, established media.

A good time then to reflect on what the internet means for the history of the future.

As any historian studying the deep past will tell you, the problem is the lack of sources. And as any historian will tell you about modern history, the problem is how to cope with the surfeit of sources.

The internet means the availability of information has expanded exponentially. It may be an advantage to get eyewitness accounts, but there is a danger that historians buckle under the sheer volume of source material.

Historians of the future will develop apps that crawl the web, searching out information, aggregating it and elaborately filtering it.

Behind all of this the fundamentals of history remain the same. Having spent a few years studying and then practicing the subject, I can say two things:

1. Raw history doesn’t make sense. Source information is a random mass and a random mess. Meaning does not exist within it until a historian comes along to impose structure on it. Don’t think that the themes neatly presented in school history text-books are inevitable conclusions lurking within sources, which just needed to be liberated. In an internet age it will even trickier to make sense of the mess.

2. History is not about the past. Odd, I know, but it’s true. History is the way we work out how we arrived at the present. In future, history will still be about the present.