Historians however would love to have more garbage from history, to get more insights on "real" life rather than just the parts one considered worth keeping.
If I could time jump it would be interesting to see how historians inna thousand years will look back at our period where a lot of information will just disappear without traces as digital media rots.
I regularly wonder if modern educated people do not journal as much as previous century educated people who were kind of rare.
Maybe we should get a journaling boom going.
But it has to be written, because pen and paper is literally ten times more durable than even good digital storage.
> pen and paper is literally ten times more durable than even good digital storage.
citation needed lol. data replication >>>> paper's single point of failure.
The question is: What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
Sure, as long as the media is copied there is a chance of survival, but will this then be "average" material or things we now consider interesting, only? Will the chain hold or will it become as uninteresting as many other things were over time? Will the Organisation doing it be funded? Will the location where this happens be spares from war?
For today's historians the random finds are important artifacts to understand "average" people's lives as the well preserved documents are legends on the mighty people.
Having lots of material all over gives a chance for some to survive and from 40 years or so back we were in a good spot. Lots of paper allover about everything. Analog vinyl records, which might be readable in a future to learn about our music. But now all on storage media, where many forms see data loss, where the format is outdated and (when looking from a thousand years away) fast change of data formats etc.
> The question is: What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
But that's just survivorship bias. The vast vast vast majority of all written sheets of paper have been lost to history. Those deemed worthy were carefully preserved, some of the rest was preserved by a fluke. The same is happening with digital media.
> What is more likely in 1000 years to still exist and being readable. The papers caught in some lost ruins or some form of storage media?
The storage media. We have evidence to support this:
* original paper works from 1000 years ago are insanely rare
* more recent storage media provide much more content
How many digital copies of Beowulf do we have? Millions?
How many paper copies from 1000 years ago? one
how many other works from 1000 years ago do we have zero copies of thanks to paper's fragility and thus don't even know existed? probably a lot
However that one paper, stating a random fact, might tell more about the people than an epic poem.
You can't have a fully history without either.
we'd keep the curiosities around, like so much Ea Nasir Sells Shit Copper. we have room for like 5-10 of those per century. not like 8 billion. much of life is mundane.
> much of life is mundane.
The things that make (or fail to make) life mundane at some point in history are themselves subjects of significant academic interest.
(And of course we have no way to tell what things are "curiosities" or not. Preservation can be seen as a way to minimize survivorship bias.)
Yes, at the same time we'd be excited about more mundane sources from history. The legends about the mighty are interesting, but what do we actually know about every day love from people a thousand years ago? Very little. Most things are speculation based on objects (tools etc.), on structure of buildings and so on. If we go back just few hundred years there is (using European perspective) a somewhat interesting source in court cases from legal conflicts between "average" people, but in older times more or less all written material is on the powerful, be it worldly or religious power, which often describes the rulers in an extra positive way (from their perspective) and their opponents extra weak.
Having more average sources certainly helps and we now aren't good judges on what will be relevant in future. We can only try to keep some of everything.
Today’s mundane is tomorrow’s fascination
We also have rooms full of footprints. In a thousand years, your mundane is the fascination of the world.
Imagine being judged 1000s of year later by some Yelp reviews like poor Nasir.