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MrNemo posted:As others have said the problem with history is that you need breadth to appreciate any of the depth of historical study (the life of a Roman Plebeian might be kind of interesting but it's probably not going to hold your attention without knowing the context of his whole station within society and why that society might matter to you, personally, in the first place). On the other hand without the microscope/depth approach then history turns into a big list of dates and names because, it turns out, a lot of poo poo happened in the world prior to most of us being born and without giving some more information and background that's all you can do. I wanted to ask this a few days ago, but the thread was discussing something else. How will history be taught in 4000 years? If people are the same, but there is twice as much history, what does that mean for what is learned? What is forgotten? What matters and is kept, and why?
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May 1, 2015 10:07
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Great Cyberdong, the hereticlock is asking questions about history of the ancients. Shall we throw it into the quantum pits?
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May 1, 2015 10:09
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Keldoclock posted:I wanted to ask this a few days ago, but the thread was discussing something else. Depends on who exists in the year 6015. 4000 years is enough time to elapse that almost anything could happen so that's difficult to answer. Your general question though is one that we still struggle to answer because it's basically asking what is history. Even if we shortened down the period to 100 years, I'd say it's still a very political question. We were all discussing what we learned as students in different countries, and there's a significant amount of variation in what subjects we were taught. There were commonalities but based upon our geography there were particular themes, and even then particular personalities (good teachers vs bad teachers) changed what we learned. Time would give us the same sort of answers because what is meaningful I think will largely depend on who is alive in 2115. Perhaps in 100 year we wouldn't have 'forgotten' so much but the emphasis would change. Thinking off the top of my head in a decade 1991-2001 there was a complete shift in where the money was going for departments and universities in the US. Prior to 1991, there was a definite emphasis on Eastern Europe and the field of Soviet Studies. People could make their careers on divining the internal movements of the Politburo by analyzing who was standing where in particular photographs. When the USSR collapsed, the field dried up and so did the money. There was far less money for research on anything relating to the subject. Post 2001 however there was a renewed emphasis on Middle Eastern studies. After 9/11, the US government was intensely interested in the Middle East and anybody with information on it. While the US government might not be interested per se in the travels of Ibn Battuta, the departments would benefit from the extra attention and relevancy regardless. Is the study of all history so political? No, some people will research things for fun, but it's a lot more difficult to maintain knowledge of a past if it doesn't elicit interest in those with the resources to maintain it. There are alternative ways of recording the past however but it wouldn't have the exactness of academic history.
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May 1, 2015 11:10
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I depends a lot on whether you're talking about history as an academic discipline or history in schools as well. History in schools will change a huge amount because the curriculum isn't really designed to teach children about the study of history. It's designed to teach 1) A national narrative, to help form a shared cultural idea within nations. Hence the concentration of Americans here on US history, my own experience of learning about Rome, as something culturally relevant, followed with lots of poo poo about medieval assholes marrying and killing each other in quite a small geographical area before hitting the British Empire and suddenly there's a whole rest of the world, and 2) A general understanding of what's important to society and where we've gone wrong before. This is the big reason WWI and II are such mainstays of Western history education, both are seen as fundamental breakdowns in our own societies and something people need to be aware of in order to guard against as well as why even in the UK we get to study the Great Depression alongside Weimar Germany. Now that's to not directly answer your question but in terms of school history in 4,000 years, I suspect those two main goals are going to have something roughly analagous (assuming we haven't hit the technological/sociological singularity and ascended into proto-Godhood). History is going to feature the main historical period that links our society (or yours, theirs, whatever) to each other and any particularly huge events/blocks along the way. I imagine in 4,000 years if records are maintained there will be some coverage of Rome and China, discussion of the Old World meeting the New world and the World Wars might get thrown into a couple of paragraphs in a text book. Considering that all that kind of stuff will be on about the same chronological distance as Troy is to us that's about as much attention as I'd expect to be paid to it.
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May 1, 2015 13:39
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Keldoclock posted:I wanted to ask this a few days ago, but the thread was discussing something else. Wouldn't it in a lot of ways be much more history? We're generating preposterous amounts of data now. There's much better coverage of different social classes, everyday life and so on.
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May 1, 2015 13:41
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If there are any people in 4000 years they will be probably as different as we are from cavemen, given the rate of technological change. I imagine it will be very difficult to bridge the sympathetic difference between them and us.
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May 1, 2015 13:53
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Keldoclock posted:How will history be taught in 4000 years? If people are the same, but there is twice as much history, what does that mean for what is learned? What is forgotten? What matters and is kept, and why? I think we covered this already. 
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May 1, 2015 14:00
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So nobody knows about how spiders were perceived by Romans?
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May 1, 2015 14:32
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Disinterested posted:If there are any people in 4000 years they will be probably as different as we are from cavemen, given the rate of technological change. I imagine it will be very difficult to bridge the sympathetic difference between them and us.
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May 1, 2015 14:44
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Kurtofan posted:So nobody knows about how spiders were perceived by Romans? Romans don't seem to have been big fans of anything natural, generally.
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May 1, 2015 14:49
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Halloween Jack posted:The really weird thing is that they might have video footage of exactly how we behaved. You mean like Videos of Nicky Minaj?
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May 1, 2015 14:59
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Kurtofan posted:So nobody knows about how spiders were perceived by Romans? You could ask?
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May 1, 2015 15:18
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Arglebargle III posted:You could ask? He did ask. There aren't many poisonous spiders in Italy and the broader Mediterranean, so they don't come up much in Roman culture.
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May 1, 2015 15:29
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Keldoclock posted:I wanted to ask this a few days ago, but the thread was discussing something else. By that time, our civilization will most likely have destroyed itself or been wiped out by a natural disaster. Civilization will rebuild itself and eventually some guy is going to talk about an ancient civilization called 'Murica and people will call him crazy.
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May 1, 2015 15:38
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Kaal posted:He did ask. There aren't many poisonous spiders in Italy and the broader Mediterranean, so they don't come up much in Roman culture. I mean, he could ask a Roman.
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May 1, 2015 15:39
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JaucheCharly posted:You mean like Videos of Nicky Minaj? More like 500,000,000 vines and vlogs of people doing boring everyday stuff that are posted every month to social media. BurningStone posted:I'm not so sure about that. If you read, for instance, descriptions of barbarians or foreign countries, it sure sounds like a modern description of race, even if that exact term wasn't used. Writers will assign the people of different areas distinctive appearances and character. Germans look like this, act like that, but Gauls look like this and dress in a different way. It sounds very much like a 1920s discussion of "national character." On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon in the same time period to assume that apes were just hairy rude humans who lived far away.
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May 1, 2015 16:48
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Nintendo Kid posted:On the other hand, it wasn't uncommon in the same time period to assume that apes were just hairy rude humans who lived far away. Which could say more about how they thought about foreigners than apes
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May 1, 2015 17:36
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Nintendo Kid posted:More like 500,000,000 vines and vlogs of people doing boring everyday stuff that are posted every month to social media. History is at its most interesting when it's boring and everyday, though.
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May 1, 2015 18:11
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Yeah I really hope a lot of our lives are preserved with all our new media forms. The Vindolanda tablets are one of the coolest Roman finds ever and that's as close to Roman blogs as you'd get. That and the "I hosed Gaius' sister" scrawled on bathroom walls in Pompeii I guess.
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May 1, 2015 18:23
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Oberleutnant posted:History is at its most interesting when it's boring and everyday, though. Yeah my point is just that it's not going to be wacky heavily produced music videos that are most likely to survive and teach the future, but a grip of the assloads of everyday videos that will actually be showing people doing normal things.
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May 1, 2015 18:23
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All those people posting pictures of their food on facebook are going to be invaluable to future anthropologists
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May 1, 2015 18:28
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Oberleutnant posted:History is at its most interesting when it's boring and everyday, though. One of the things that really struck me is how mundane most historical events are. Like, for the people living it, many historical events are often just normal boring days. What turn out to be huge decisions are made casually without any idea that it will turn out to be important. It's only years later looking back that we can see what turned out to be important. It's just life for the people in the midst of it.
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May 1, 2015 18:31
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Pornographic Memory posted:All those people posting pictures of their food on facebook are going to be invaluable to future anthropologists The early 21st century was the first time food culture became systematically documented on a near global scale.
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May 1, 2015 18:32
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Grand Fromage posted:Yeah I really hope a lot of our lives are preserved with all our new media forms. The Vindolanda tablets are one of the coolest Roman finds ever and that's as close to Roman blogs as you'd get. Imagine future archaeologists digging up modern military bases.
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May 1, 2015 18:55
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We believe the F22 Raptor was vitally important in the Confederate victory over the Nazis.
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May 1, 2015 18:58
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How likely is it that our data storage capacities (and I mean longterm storage without corruption) expands in the same pace that e.g. each person leaves as soon as he/she gets a smartphone. Or think about your browsing history (the ISP that I worked at kept all your connection data just as long as law demanded, but that's probably an exception), or the stuff that google does with it's ads.
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May 1, 2015 18:59
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It's going to be weird and there's no precedent. I would have to assume a lot more records will survive from now than from a thousand years ago, but there surely will still be a huge percentage of stuff that is lost. E: I've thought for a while that archive organizations like the Library of Congress should print out and store a lot of culturally significant stuff from the internet, but also print some significant amount of just random poo poo like blogs and news sites. Paper will always be accessible if it's stored properly, and there's no way to know what future historians will find useful so we should try to preserve a wide range of things. Grand Fromage fucked around with this message at 19:05 on May 1, 2015 |
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May 1, 2015 19:01
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Archiving of "born digital" records is still an ongoing discussion in archives, but if the archive I work in is any indication all your modern/digital records are hosed lol
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May 1, 2015 19:03
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From what I've picked up about long term data storage, it's a really costly thing.
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May 1, 2015 19:13
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I make a hard copy of all my facebook statuses by engraving it into huge slabs of granite I keep in a cave. Thousands of years from now archaeologists will be amazed to find a perfectly preserved treasure trove of corny jokes and bad puns.
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May 1, 2015 19:15
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Imagine somebody printed out your browser history.
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May 1, 2015 19:17
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JaucheCharly posted:Imagine somebody printed out your browser history. "did hitler eat ice cream?" was one of the big question of the 21st century.
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May 1, 2015 19:21
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Grand Fromage posted:It's going to be weird and there's no precedent. I would have to assume a lot more records will survive from now than from a thousand years ago, but there surely will still be a huge percentage of stuff that is lost. The Library of Congress is, among other things, preserving this very forum, and I do believe part of their preservation process involves printing some stuff out or writing to microfilm just in case. But they also keep some of the most extensive collections of devices for reading antiquated electronic formats in the world as well.
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May 1, 2015 19:22
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What do you mean this very forum? Is this for real?
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May 1, 2015 19:24
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JaucheCharly posted:Imagine somebody printed out your browser history. "Well, it seems like people in the 21st century were just as obsessed by porn and toilet humour as people in every other human era. Futhermore *faaaaaart*" - Professor Zargax's lecture series on Human History and poop jokes, Oxford University, 6015
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May 1, 2015 19:33
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"Early 21st century humans were still learning how to use the relatively new technology of computers and would therefore sometimes accidentally insert pictures of ecstatic cats into their work."
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May 1, 2015 19:36
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How did this feline get there?
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May 1, 2015 19:37
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Man, imagine the academic papers trying to explain FYAD.
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May 1, 2015 19:43
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Kurtofan posted:What do you mean this very forum? Is this for real? It was announced on June 5th last year: http://blogs.loc.gov/folklife/2014/06/getting-serious-about-collecting-and-preserving-digital-culture/ They're also including Fark, some brony website, YTMND and Know Your Meme. In all likelihood something you posted will be a minor part of some grad student's work in like 60 years.
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May 1, 2015 19:57
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Nintendo Kid posted:It was announced on June 5th last year: I knew I was destined for greatness.
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May 1, 2015 20:01
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