How will this era be remembered in the future and how much of our knowledge will be preserved?

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Finder

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I have often wondered how this era will be remembered and what history will say about us. We only know about history based on what others left behind be that books, scrolls, or tablets and in reality there are large gaps in history we know very little about.

I have long believed this era will be one of those gaps, we live in a digital era and that doesn't lend itself to preservation. Over the coming centuries most data from this era will be lost, corrupted, or unusable.

We might figure out the solution to truly long term digital preservation someday, but as we speak information is being lost permanently, forgotten forever. Digital knowledge is harder to preserve than a book or tablet, it takes a lot more active effect and it needs to be babysat without failure for generations as mediums change and formats change.

That aside, 99.99% is data is completely worthless, how do you know what data is relevant and what isn't? This is basically impossible to figure out and what we do preserve might very be the wrong things.

Some people think this will be one of the most well documented eras for future historians, but I think it will be the exact opposite. What are your thoughts?
 
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*pushes up glasses* Heh, as a historian I am an expert in this stuff

We only know about history based on what others left behind be that books, scrolls, or tablets and in reality there are large gaps in history we know very little about.
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First of all, the statement that we know history is already a contentious one. In the end, only short term factual history has a direct influence on your daily life. Anything else is either window-dressing, abused for political gain or a basis for collective identity. Regarding large gaps, they often are more the result of a lack of study then a lack of sources to study.

There are a few debates that keep raging in the field of history (honestly no debate about history is ever settled. Some of the major ones are
Construction vs Re-construction: As a historian, does one construct a version of history, influenced by ones personal beliefs, or does one re-construct what actually happened.
Within vs Without: Is it best to do history as someone who is part of a certain culture, and thus is capable of getting cultural nuances? Or is a unbiased view from a total stranger more preferable?
Fact vs Fable: Just because something is written down, does that make it a fact? There is no way to verify if something actually happened.
Socio-political responsibility vs l'histoire pour l'histoire: Does the historian have a moral duty towards the society at large to use his historical knowledge to influence public debate, or should history be studied for its own sake?

I have long believed this era will be one of those gaps, we live in a digital era and that doesn't lend itself to preservation. Over the coming centuries most data from this era will be lost, corrupted, or unusable.
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While digital preservation has it's major problems, it still is not the standard for archives. Almost all major archives still work with paper, and the digital aspect is just an extra to make it easy for people across the world. Important data is still printed out to be archived.
Some things will be lost, of course, but that always happens. The vast majority of important information will be saved tho (and it will be on paper)

That aside, 99.99% is data is completely worthless, how do you know what data is relevant and what isn't? This is basically impossible to figure out and what we do preserve might very be the wrong things.
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Archivists do this already, and have always done it. 80% of what gets donated to archives gets dumped, because rack space (calculated in running meters. e.g. the archive of this or that philosopher takes up 5m of rack space. There are kilometers of rackspace in most archives.) is at a premium. So the archivists make choices about what they keep and what they don't. (and they keep a fuckton).

Beyond that, the historian is the one who requests different archival pieces and then makes his own selection for his research. And then there is another major filter between academic history and public history.

Some people think this will be one of the most well documented eras for future historians, but I think it will be the exact opposite. What are your thoughts?
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Historians are extremely flexible in their thinking and methods, so neither a shortage of sources or an overload of sources forms a problem. f.e. Ladurie (important historian) wrote a book about a single southern french village from a single source. He went into incredible depths and the book had quite a lot of impact. One of his friends, Braudel (also an important historian), did the opposite: he wrote a very shallow, but thematically and geographically wide-reaching book about the entire mediterrean as a system.

It also depends on what field the historian researches or what method is in vogue in that specific future, but no matter what happens, historians will adapt.
 
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Being dramatic but this era will either go down in history as a small sort of "second dark age" that delayed human advancement (a sort of road bump on our progress as a species) or it will be even longer and worse than the last dark age. If humans are still alive by the time it ends they might remember it as the era the world almost ended.

Edit: Almost all information these days is digital. It'll be a blank spot and the only history will be shit our descendants tell their kids, and then their children and so on. They'll say it was a great death of information.
 
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The woketards have taken over and are determined to scour away every achievement of the past like an acid wave. They're taking down statues of the Founding Fathers and putting up monuments to joggers who died of meth and suicide by cop. They're importing brown people by the planeload. America as we know it won't exist in 100 years, and whites are so pathologically self-destructive, they may not even exist outside of Amish colonies.

The things I grew up with and thought would last forever have been declared haram and are being replaced with Leftist Boilerplate. The newer generations are filled with freaks whose brains don't work properly, and who think that it's a good idea to cram gay sex into kids cartoons and that people can become the opposite sex on a whim. I don't want to experience America blowing up, but part of me does, just to see the assholes pushing this Commie nonsense receive some kind of Nature-driven punishment for their war against Reality..
 
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I hope Current Year Clown World will be seen as the insane circus it was. Especially with coronapanic.

Although not all is bad though. Hopefully the knowledge of the universe gained now will be remembered.
 
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Depends on if we win or not. If Globohomo implodes, we'll be remembered similarly to Weimar, I think. If Globohomo wins, this era will be remembered probably similarly to how the Great Leap Forward is remembered in China. Could be wrong but I dunno. I want a nuclear winter.
 
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People in here have mentioned the historical knowledge that will be lost and rewritten but there will also be plenty of technical knowledge that will be lost as well. I see this most strikingly in programming as the abstraction towards higher languages and the pajeetification of the field has led to less knowledge required and thus known to the typical programmer of today. In addition, there are plenty of legacy systems in place which are sparsely documented and whose knowledge bearers are not passing down to the next generation. The power lines, the oil pipelines, bridges, roads, all architecture needs competent maintainers. Furthermore all throughout history, we see the loss of knowledge in conjunction with a withering empire.
 
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Not positvely. I suspect it’ll be seen as an age of excess and we’ll be the lolcows of human history. Something along the lines of “wow, people in the early 21st century were such idiots. They’d think you would become a woman by just using an anime avatar or putting on a dress.”
 
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It'll be called the Second Enlightenment and mark the end of mad pants-shitting crackers running anything.
 
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It all depends on who writes it and when.

Some knowledge will survive somewhere.

But I think the lasting one will be the "end of the American Empire" and will be filed away with the end of Rome and the British Empire in a broad geopolitical sense.

Celebrity and wokeshit will dissapear with american culture, or at best be archived away, only to be researched by a few future autis... I mean scientists.
 
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