Archiving Our Own Age

Reading through Anne Burdick's Digital_Humanities for this class was difficult for me. To be honest I was lost and confused much of the time within all of the jargon and structure. But there was one point that stood out to me and made me really think about and appreciate all that we are able to do now with the digital technology. I never thought about it before, but we are able to archive our own age. That blows my mind. Books, magazines, pictures, and more can be uploaded into the computer system to be forever protected on this invisible thing called the Internet. Not only that, our social media can be saved on the Internet as well. This will be such a different age for future historians to research than what we modern historians study. There will be so much data from all different types of sources. This blows my mind.

I study medieval times where only the literate could write and leave us people in the future guessing what the illiterate thought. In modern times we have an incredible amount of people who are literate. But more than that, we have a huge number of people writing almost constantly. Before the Internet but in a time where more people were literate, in nineteenth century America or Europe for example, people wrote “snail mail” letters to a very small audience of mostly one person (per letter). Now, we have nearly everyone (in these same countries and others) writing to a gigantic audience whenever they want. Anyone can talk to potentially millions of people all at once. And it is not often just a statement, but a start to a conversation. And it is immediate. We can instant message someone across the room or across the world. And going beyond that, we can actually have a “face to face” conversation with anyone anywhere in the world with such things as Skype. It is incredible to me that we are able to be so instantly and constantly connected with other people.

Coming back to my original point of archiving our age, we have written evidence from people of all kinds about what they thought, felt, and believed in this twenty-first century because of social media and the Internet. Future people won't have to wonder what the people not in power thought about at this time because all income-levels, jobs, etc. have an equal opportunity to write whatever they want on the Internet through blogs, Twitter, FaceBook, etc., and then they are archived in the Internet so that future generations studying our time will have a more complete picture of what life was like now than we have of what medieval times were like. And that is truly incredible to me.