3 ms·

Seriously makes me wonder if future generations would be able to garner a relatively objective understanding of everything that's happened. 100 years later, wh

by PakG1 6y ago

Seriously makes me wonder if future generations would be able to garner a relatively objective understanding of everything that's happened. 100 years later, what would make one media source from today be considered more reliable than another from today? What first person accounts would be considered more reliable than another? Would you take the words of people on the street over the words of the president? What of all the people who agree that there's a deep state movement to work against the president in secret? How the heck would a historian be able to figure out what really happened? Suddenly makes me wonder how skeptical I should be of all our understanding of recorded history.

karlshea 6y ago
I wonder where a historian will even be able to read anything at all from this time. Most of the discourse on this has been online, and who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok?
- gizmo686 6y ago
  A) Archive.org B) We are recording way more today than at any point in history. It is not like what is currently on Reddit and Tik Tok would have been published in books, with copies stored on slides and archived in libraries around the world. It would have been done in person (or never at all), and never written down in the first place.
- johnchristopher 6y ago
  > who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok? I was told the CCP has the list of every video of skateboarding and memes I liked on the latter.
rpeden 6y ago
I think the “how do I figure out what the heck really happened” part is something most historians care about quite deeply and is an important part of historiography. Looking at the veracity of previously recorded history is part of historiography as well. I think skepticism of recorded history is healthy in general. Historians would probably agree.
- blaser-waffle 6y ago
  The depictions of Nero and Caligula come to mind. Dudes might have been crazy, but there were few contemporary resources available to compare. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Historiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Historiography What scares me is that any large org -- facebook, instagram, AP News, Google, the BBC -- could just delete all of their archives, or get some sort of nasty randsomware that just deletes everything or rewrites everything. And that's just an automated thing; the 1984-syle deliberate rewrites could be done via an automated script or some next-gen GPT-3 thing.
magicsmoke 6y ago
I have a more cynical take that what exactly happened is less important than how we interpret what we believe to have happened. Perhaps there are historians that are so objective as to be robotic in uncovering and disseminating only the facts, but I believe most historical studies are entangled with moral arguments. Firstly, even if we focus only on the facts, reality is so complex and multifaceted that it is inevitable a historian must selectively omit material in order to communicate a story a public can understand, and this inevitably obscures the facts and pulls in the historian's own moral interpretations of what is worth communicating. Secondly, although there may be people who study history for the love of uncovering past events without preconceptions or bias, they are funded by those that may not share the same goals. History is used to induce a sense of shared national identity in schoolchildren, demonize others to justify confrontation, and stir citizens into making personal sacrifices for the group. Even if all the events are true, how they are presented, interpreted, and selectively omitted can create wildly different opinions on the same historical event. Ultimately, I think history is more a tool of social control than any objective study. A person unmoored from history will focus only on his immediate wants and needs. A person with some education in history will call upon historical grudges and pride in the heroism of those long dead to take part in social structures that far exceeds him in numbers and lifespan. Storytelling is what makes us social animals, and history is just a more believable form of storytelling. What really happened isn't valuable in itself but how it adds to the persuasiveness of that story.

by PakG1 6y ago

karlshea 6y ago

I wonder where a historian will even be able to read anything at all from this time. Most of the discourse on this has been online, and who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok?

gizmo686 6y ago
A) Archive.org B) We are recording way more today than at any point in history. It is not like what is currently on Reddit and Tik Tok would have been published in books, with copies stored on slides and archived in libraries around the world. It would have been done in person (or never at all), and never written down in the first place.
johnchristopher 6y ago
> who will have archived Reddit and Tik Tok? I was told the CCP has the list of every video of skateboarding and memes I liked on the latter.

rpeden 6y ago

I think the “how do I figure out what the heck really happened” part is something most historians care about quite deeply and is an important part of historiography. Looking at the veracity of previously recorded history is part of historiography as well. I think skepticism of recorded history is healthy in general. Historians would probably agree.

blaser-waffle 6y ago
The depictions of Nero and Caligula come to mind. Dudes might have been crazy, but there were few contemporary resources available to compare. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Historiography https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nero#Historiography What scares me is that any large org -- facebook, instagram, AP News, Google, the BBC -- could just delete all of their archives, or get some sort of nasty randsomware that just deletes everything or rewrites everything. And that's just an automated thing; the 1984-syle deliberate rewrites could be done via an automated script or some next-gen GPT-3 thing.

magicsmoke 6y ago

I have a more cynical take that what exactly happened is less important than how we interpret what we believe to have happened. Perhaps there are historians that are so objective as to be robotic in uncovering and disseminating only the facts, but I believe most historical studies are entangled with moral arguments. Firstly, even if we focus only on the facts, reality is so complex and multifaceted that it is inevitable a historian must selectively omit material in order to communicate a story a public can understand, and this inevitably obscures the facts and pulls in the historian's own moral interpretations of what is worth communicating. Secondly, although there may be people who study history for the love of uncovering past events without preconceptions or bias, they are funded by those that may not share the same goals. History is used to induce a sense of shared national identity in schoolchildren, demonize others to justify confrontation, and stir citizens into making personal sacrifices for the group. Even if all the events are true, how they are presented, interpreted, and selectively omitted can create wildly different opinions on the same historical event. Ultimately, I think history is more a tool of social control than any objective study. A person unmoored from history will focus only on his immediate wants and needs. A person with some education in history will call upon historical grudges and pride in the heroism of those long dead to take part in social structures that far exceeds him in numbers and lifespan. Storytelling is what makes us social animals, and history is just a more believable form of storytelling. What really happened isn't valuable in itself but how it adds to the persuasiveness of that story.