5 ms·

I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now wh

by avar 7y ago

I wonder if by moving to digital communications we won't paradoxically be leaving a black hole for future historians when it comes to such records. I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. Dead people don't pay for advertising revenue, so that data's likely being deleted soon after they're gone, or when their phone dies. Yes some of these services allow salvaging the data of relatives, but most people aren't going to be paying whatever's the future Google extra money monthly to preserve grandma's multi-gigabyte E-Mail account. What would previously be letters from the front stored in a box somewhere will be stored alongside swaths of commercial E-Mail and spam.

erikpukinskis 7y ago
I keep old phones, laptops, and hard drives in a box for that reason. Eventually a robot may find it in the rubble and wave their magnetic proboscis over it and include things they find in their vlog.
paxys 7y ago
It's becoming expected that communication between two people or groups of people be fully private and encrypted, which was never the norm in the past. Not having random historical records is a side-effect of that, and IMO will only get worse.
- robjan 7y ago
  In the past, people didn't share as much and as often so it didn't matter that their communications weren't encrypted. These days, the average person probably sends hundreds or thousands of messages per day across social media and instant messaging apps.
GhettoMaestro 7y ago
What is the value? Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value. If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention. (Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)
- avar 7y ago
  It's a good question. The reason we know how devastating and inhumane wars like say the Eastern front in WWII is in no small due to these sorts of records, otherwise we'd mostly just have contemporary state propaganda, statistics and the like. Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so many millions died. I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy. Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their surviving immediate relatives. But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is long dead.
  - GhettoMaestro 7y ago
    Good point - and very potent. Thank you for your thoughts.
  - daveFNbuck 7y ago
    Living people are harmed by such disclosures if the idea that this might happen to their communications in the future makes them less willing to communicate openly and honestly with their loved ones.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      Does the idea of a future historian poring over your e-mails make you less willing to send those e-mails today?
      - daveFNbuck 7y ago
        No, but I don't think this will happen and I don't send emails that I'm particularly concerned about others reading. WWII letters were used as an example here. My grandfather was alive during WWII. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are people sending emails they'd much rather not have their grandchildren learn about after their death.
scarejunba 7y ago
You want privacy. That's privacy. Historians' heroes will be those with publicly facing personas. No one will remember anyone except the guy with a public Twitter profile.
Alex3917 7y ago
> I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. There are hundreds of email archivists working at universities across the country. The reason you don't hear about them is that email didn't exist until ~1971, universities don't accession email collections until either after someone dies or at least until relatively late in their career, and once collections are accessioned they are usually embargoed for some amount of time -- e.g. IIRC 50 years in the case of Harvard. Also, even though there are 15 or so different email archival software packages, none of them is really fully baked yet, so right now lots of universities are just putting email into longterm storage formats and then they're content to just wait another 10+ years until the email archival software is in a better state before processing them for publication. If you have good email threads you want to publish on the Internet now though, you can use our tool https://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com.
- est31 7y ago
  E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. What about Whatsapp, Slack, etc? Shared Google documents? You need to create archivers for each of these apps, or at least the apps where the "important" communication is happening over.
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    > E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. I mean unless you think the value of the knowledge contained within email is obviously less than the value that will be unlocked by self-driving cars, it stands to reason that solving the problem may not actually be any less complicated.
  - ISL 7y ago
    That is one of the key reasons not to use the chat-like apps. Hard to search, hard to back up, hard to thread...
    - Alex3917 7y ago
      This. Every time you send a message in one of those apps, it's like taking a $20 bill and lighting it on fire. I'll admit they have their uses, and hopefully they'll get better over time. But given their current state, if you don't place any value on what you're saying then why even say it in the first place?
gpm 7y ago
On the other hand, we are by accident storing vastly more communication than we use to. Many letters I would not have saved, and conversations that would never have even have been recorded are now by default. All it takes is someone finding a copy of them 100 (or 1000) years from now. Most copies, like most old books and most letters, will be destroyed. But some copies of some peoples information will probably live on. Some hard drives and flash memory will be miraculously preserved or whatever for future generations automated electron scanning microscopes to decode.
- WalterBright 7y ago
  I have some letters my grandfather wrote to his mother when he was a young man: http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html But the letters my grandmother wrote to him are totally lost.
hos234 7y ago
They are busy chatting about airstrikes on WhatsApp these days so I am guessing email is passe - https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-smartphone-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-smartphone-war/
jcims 7y ago
It probably does so more than is immediately obvious. If you look at a letter or postcard or journal, there's a physically atomic and generally sufficient representation of the content. They contain the who/what/when/where/why of the story and, if discovered in the future generally persist in a complete state. With digital communications, this is generally not going to be the case. If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio. Most of the content we see now is emergent from the system that stewards it and is only accessible when it's in operation.
- chrisweekly 7y ago
  > "If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio." +1 for the terrific analogy!
cjslep 7y ago
This is why I've taken up a fountain pen, stamps, matches, and sealing wax. Fountain pen lets me write longer without pressuring my hand. Stamps for actually changing the world, as opposed to private writings. Matches and sealing wax for constructive pyromania.

by avar 7y ago

erikpukinskis 7y ago

I keep old phones, laptops, and hard drives in a box for that reason. Eventually a robot may find it in the rubble and wave their magnetic proboscis over it and include things they find in their vlog.

paxys 7y ago

It's becoming expected that communication between two people or groups of people be fully private and encrypted, which was never the norm in the past. Not having random historical records is a side-effect of that, and IMO will only get worse.

robjan 7y ago
In the past, people didn't share as much and as often so it didn't matter that their communications weren't encrypted. These days, the average person probably sends hundreds or thousands of messages per day across social media and instant messaging apps.

GhettoMaestro 7y ago

What is the value? Honestly I view all of this (digging into someone's personal correspondence from the past) as extremely overly voyeuristic, rather than having actual value. If it wasn't meant to be public originally, I don't want it to be public. It does not respect the original author's intention. (Not trying to be hostile - but I just wanted to say this.)

avar 7y ago
It's a good question. The reason we know how devastating and inhumane wars like say the Eastern front in WWII is in no small due to these sorts of records, otherwise we'd mostly just have contemporary state propaganda, statistics and the like. Reading about what a meat grinder war is for the grunt on the ground helps future generations a lot more in not repeating those mistakes than so-and-so many millions died. I think past a given point we shouldn't respect the author's privacy. Everybody's got records they'd like to keep private, and perhaps they'd even like to keep it private past their death to avoid some harm among their surviving immediate relatives. But past a certain point everyone who could be harmed by such disclosures is long dead.
- GhettoMaestro 7y ago
  Good point - and very potent. Thank you for your thoughts.
- daveFNbuck 7y ago
  Living people are harmed by such disclosures if the idea that this might happen to their communications in the future makes them less willing to communicate openly and honestly with their loved ones.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    Does the idea of a future historian poring over your e-mails make you less willing to send those e-mails today?
    - daveFNbuck 7y ago
      No, but I don't think this will happen and I don't send emails that I'm particularly concerned about others reading. WWII letters were used as an example here. My grandfather was alive during WWII. I think it's reasonable to expect that there are people sending emails they'd much rather not have their grandchildren learn about after their death.

scarejunba 7y ago

You want privacy. That's privacy. Historians' heroes will be those with publicly facing personas. No one will remember anyone except the guy with a public Twitter profile.

Alex3917 7y ago

> I.e. now what would previously have been letters from the front might be sent as a text, phone call or E-Mail. There are hundreds of email archivists working at universities across the country. The reason you don't hear about them is that email didn't exist until ~1971, universities don't accession email collections until either after someone dies or at least until relatively late in their career, and once collections are accessioned they are usually embargoed for some amount of time -- e.g. IIRC 50 years in the case of Harvard. Also, even though there are 15 or so different email archival software packages, none of them is really fully baked yet, so right now lots of universities are just putting email into longterm storage formats and then they're content to just wait another 10+ years until the email archival software is in a better state before processing them for publication. If you have good email threads you want to publish on the Internet now though, you can use our tool https://www.fwdeveryone.com https://www.fwdeveryone.com.

est31 7y ago
E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. What about Whatsapp, Slack, etc? Shared Google documents? You need to create archivers for each of these apps, or at least the apps where the "important" communication is happening over.
- Alex3917 7y ago
  > E-Mails are fairly easy to archive. I mean unless you think the value of the knowledge contained within email is obviously less than the value that will be unlocked by self-driving cars, it stands to reason that solving the problem may not actually be any less complicated.
- ISL 7y ago
  That is one of the key reasons not to use the chat-like apps. Hard to search, hard to back up, hard to thread...
  - Alex3917 7y ago
    This. Every time you send a message in one of those apps, it's like taking a $20 bill and lighting it on fire. I'll admit they have their uses, and hopefully they'll get better over time. But given their current state, if you don't place any value on what you're saying then why even say it in the first place?

gpm 7y ago

On the other hand, we are by accident storing vastly more communication than we use to. Many letters I would not have saved, and conversations that would never have even have been recorded are now by default. All it takes is someone finding a copy of them 100 (or 1000) years from now. Most copies, like most old books and most letters, will be destroyed. But some copies of some peoples information will probably live on. Some hard drives and flash memory will be miraculously preserved or whatever for future generations automated electron scanning microscopes to decode.

WalterBright 7y ago
I have some letters my grandfather wrote to his mother when he was a young man: http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html http://www.walterbright.com/trip/chas.html But the letters my grandmother wrote to him are totally lost.

hos234 7y ago

They are busy chatting about airstrikes on WhatsApp these days so I am guessing email is passe - https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-smartphone-war/ https://www.wired.com/story/the-first-smartphone-war/

jcims 7y ago

It probably does so more than is immediately obvious. If you look at a letter or postcard or journal, there's a physically atomic and generally sufficient representation of the content. They contain the who/what/when/where/why of the story and, if discovered in the future generally persist in a complete state. With digital communications, this is generally not going to be the case. If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio. Most of the content we see now is emergent from the system that stewards it and is only accessible when it's in operation.

chrisweekly 7y ago
> "If someone unearths an Amazon datacenter and starts poring over the content stored in flash drives, they are going to just find volumes and volumes of raided/sharded/indexed/normalized/encrypted content that mixes presentation with prose and reads like someone quickly twisting the dial on an old analog radio." +1 for the terrific analogy!

cjslep 7y ago

This is why I've taken up a fountain pen, stamps, matches, and sealing wax. Fountain pen lets me write longer without pressuring my hand. Stamps for actually changing the world, as opposed to private writings. Matches and sealing wax for constructive pyromania.