The National Public Radio interviewed historian Eric Weiner and broadcasted his opinion on the subject of the future of history. Therefore, the author shares his thoughts on how other historians from the further centuries would evaluate our presence. This topic is very important as it shows the modern contribution to the human development. According to Weiner, his future colleagues will be surprised to find out nothing (Weiner). The author calls our time “digital dark ages”. One of the reasons to think so is that all the information which is stored nowadays will be unreadable for the future generations. The formats of digital recording are changing constantly and it is hardly possible to read a floppy disk today. The historians from the 22nd century will not have equipment to access the information from our presence. Another reason for calling our time “digital dark ages” is that there are tons of unimportant and irrelevant information available on the Internet. However, some important news is lost and cannot be restored. The future historians may consider the 21st century as something not worth their attention as the will see cat videos but will not be able to find recordings from Sidney Olympic Games, for example (Weiner). It can be said that the printed revolution moved the society to the modern ages, but the digital revolution can easily bring it down to the dark ages. It seems that the abundance of information as well as the easiness of its production result into a massive storage of irrelevant and useless data. They can be accessed everywhere but they are worthless as they do not represent the ideas of contemporary society. Previously, newspapers and journals had to choose the important news as they were limited by the format and amount of paper. However, nowadays it is possible to publish as much information as possible and the Internet is full of funny stories and videos but lack of analytical long reads. Another reason of turning into the dark ages is the availability of the formats to record sound or video. The future historians might probably lack of the modern equipment to reproduce the data. Therefore, the information for them would sound like an Old English to us.
Work Cited
Weiner, Eric. "Will Future Historians Consider These Days The Digital Dark Ages?" NPR.
NPR, 4 Jan. 2016. Web. 21 Apr. 2016.
<http://www.npr.org/2016/01/04/461878724/will-future-historians-consider-these-times-the-digital-dark-ages>.
