As the cooling economy has slowed down human migration this past year, it’s worth reflecting how intense relocation has been during the past few decades. Historically, humans have always migrated for job opportunities, but usually for just one move per generation. Today we see families relocate multiple times as a result of the Corporate Diaspora, where distant job opportunities liken white-collar executives with nomadic migrant workers.
The end result will be a genealogist’s nightmare. How do you track a family that jumps from Cincinnati to Silicon Valley to suburban Connecticut, all within a decade? Without wars, famines, religious persecutions or gold rushes to help a historian pinpoint the movements of a twentieth century family, the trail becomes muddled. When the census records finally get released, families might have moved several times between surveys. They might even end back in the town where they began, burying a significant story in the cracks of decentennial paperwork.
With any luck, our descendants will have better access to information about our lives than the generations before us. But should the data of today get lost in the digital dust, it will be no easier to map the life of a twenty-first century office worker than that of a seventeenth century peasant.
23 April 2009
27 February 2009
The new Dark Ages
With the quickly-mounting death toll of newspapers, I wonder how the daily news is going to be archived. Surely, we can't rely solely on digital files.
One of the joys in reading an old newspaper is to see how an entire page paints a portrait of an era, from the articles to the ads and everything in between. The same can't be said of internet news. A single web article from CNN.com will lose its context once the "related links" go dead and ad space draws a blank.
As much as we're witnessing a technological revolution, I fear that we may be entering another Dark Age in the eyes of future historians. The Dark Ages as we know them (AKA medieval times) are called that due to few surviving records from that time. Is that because the majority of people didn't read or write back then? Or did they, but the means to archiving their daily affairs failed miserably?
As saturated as we are these days with digital media (including this blog), I have little faith that any of it will endure for future generations to peruse. Nor will its validity. How do you carbon date an HTML file?
Farewell, newspapers!
One of the joys in reading an old newspaper is to see how an entire page paints a portrait of an era, from the articles to the ads and everything in between. The same can't be said of internet news. A single web article from CNN.com will lose its context once the "related links" go dead and ad space draws a blank.
As much as we're witnessing a technological revolution, I fear that we may be entering another Dark Age in the eyes of future historians. The Dark Ages as we know them (AKA medieval times) are called that due to few surviving records from that time. Is that because the majority of people didn't read or write back then? Or did they, but the means to archiving their daily affairs failed miserably?
As saturated as we are these days with digital media (including this blog), I have little faith that any of it will endure for future generations to peruse. Nor will its validity. How do you carbon date an HTML file?
Farewell, newspapers!
12 February 2009
Presents from the past
I'm in the process of updating the blog with my past journal entries. Keep checking back, as they will be added according to their original date.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)