When History Is Lost in the Ether

Digital archiving is shoddy and incomplete, and it will hamper the ability of future generations to understand the current era.

By
59

“Then where does the past exist, if at all?”

“In records. It is written down.” —George Orwell, 1984

In late February, Trisha Hope settled into her booth at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando, hoping to sell printed copies of her five-volume collection of former President Donald Trump’s tweets.

Hope’s goal was, of course, to unload a stack of her $39 linen-bound, self-published books, but she later told me the books had another important purpose.

Keep reading with a free account
Create a free Dispatch account to keep reading Get Started ALREADY HAVE AN ACCOUNT? SIGN IN
59
By
Comments (59)
Join The Dispatch to participate in the comments.
 
  1. Tom Neven

    I'm a military historian. What has been lost to history over the past ~20 years is enormous. Planning, intel, orders, imagery, rosters, after-action reports--all digital. And when the E-5 running the laptop sees the hard drive is full, he simply wipes it clean and starts over. We will know more about WWII down to the company level than we will about Afghanistan and Iraq even at the operational level.

    Collapse
  2. Tom Neven

    I am a military historian, and it's become very difficult to write detailed histories from the past 25 years or so because so much existed digitally: orders, intel, after-action reports, imagery. When the hard drive on a laptop in the command JOC got full, some E-5 simply wiped the drive and started over. DoD has tried, with limited success, to impress on commands at all levels the importance of maintaining and archiving this material. I'm afraid that in 50 years, we'll know more about WWII than we will about the post-9/11 wars.

    Collapse
  3. Avatar photo
    Ben Connelly

    This was an incredibly interesting and somewhat counterintuitive article! I definitely used to assume that anything online was preserved forever.

    “ (Graham noted the Wayback Machine is also one of the sites archiving Donald Trump’s tweets, but he’s missing “around 10.”)”

    Haha, how does he know that? 10? Total?

    “ In 2010, the Library of Congress began archiving all of Twitter, but dumped the project in 2017, deciding only to preserve a small selection of tweets.”

    One wonders about priorities here.

    “ Similarly, it seems likely that the only people with access to the original language of Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” will be those who own the physical copies:”

    I better make sure I didn’t get rid of my beat up old copy then.

    “ In the early 2020s, was the Washington Post more reliable than, say, The Federalist? “

    Yikes.

    “ And as for Trisha Hope’s book of Trump tweets?”

    Okay, so legitimately isn’t that DT’s intellectual property? Couldn’t he sue her?

    Collapse
  4. Avatar photo
    CP

    Excellent article. “…future citizens will live in a world of vanishing knowledge, where facts can’t be verified or refuted.” I feel like we’re already there to an extent. It’s not that you can’t verify facts, but that it’s becoming more difficult, and people’s desire for facts that don’t already fit the narratives they care about is diminishing.

    Collapse
  5. Avatar photo
    Jeff Greene

    Really great, thought-provoking article. I hope some day a future civilization will find the repository of my Facebook posts and the world will be a better place.

    Collapse
  6. Chanterelle

    This is an interesting article on an interesting topic. I have been wondering about newspaper archiving in the 21st century. I graduated college in 2000, & we still used the microfiche for research at least through the late 90s, the internet was considered unreliable. Why wouldn't historians be able to use books, hard copies? They still exist. I'm not sure that the average book is built to withstand time. Doesn't someone put together yearbooks of news stories? I remember having to by the yearly short story collection back in college, they don't have that for the news? I realize this doesn't deal with the lack of a whole newspaper on microfiche, but it's something at least.

    Collapse
  7. Avatar photo
    Bill Nelson

    I have 21 volumes of George Washington’s papers, published in the early 1920s. The letters of John Adams fill volumes, ditto Churchill and many others. Many prominent figures kept diaries which are indispensable in writing history.
    Now this is not done, and what may be a replacement, or as close as we may get, are emails. Tweets fall into a different category because often there is little thought behind them.
    Churchill lived in a world of mail being delivered several times a day. Telegrams were sent often. But communications were dominated by letters, some long, some short. Often just little 4 or 5 line notes. The official Churchill biographies are filled with copies of these.

    Collapse
  8. Avatar photo
    Ed P

    Fascinating perspective.

    Perhaps I’m missing it, but I see it quite differently. There is just oh so much more media to to capture today, we are archiving far far far more and it keeps increasing exponentially. It is not practical or wise to archive all of it.

    There is not a snowballs chance in hell Trump’s tweets are lost to history. Or the newspapers archived by countless libraries. Yes, we might not be able to save every photo and every blog, but so what. We have never been able to. A blog today is sometimes quite similar to the nonsensical ramblings of a destitute 50 years ago. Historically relevant, perhaps in some way, if some such curiosity is stumbled upon. But maybe not worth sweating about how to preserve it

    Collapse
  9. Stephen Michael Kellat

    Getting a good way to easily print digital documents directly to microform would be nice. Microforms are a wee bit more durable than computers are proving as of late. PDFs are nice but I remember when they had competition back in the day.

    People need to learn how to write print works. Write a blog? Make a print digest of entries at year’s end. Write a newsletter? Learn how to keep print backups.

    Learn how to use LaTeX, learn how a book is made according to the Chicago Manual of Style, and perhaps you may have an adventure in exploring off-line communication.

    Collapse
  10. Avatar photo
    Nick H

    Most of us have a hard time even keeping our own digital information safe and archived. This does a great job of explaining how much bigger the problem is for the internet at large.

    Collapse
Load More