But It Will Kill Trees....

Recently the noted journalist and, after ten critically-acclaimed books, we can also call him a historian, David G. McCullough gave a lecture at the 11th annual National Book Festival on the National Mall in Washington, DC, which was televised by CSpan 2's "BookTV". Mr. McCullough, who was speaking in support of his recently-published book The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris, cracked a joke at one point that if anyone today wants to be famous in the future, all they need do is keep a daily diary in paper form in which they can write about anything -- their daily lives, anecdotes about friends, politics, fashion, latest TV shows, favorite music, holidays, etc. -- and at some point towards the end of your life when you know the end is nigh, simply mail your diary to the Library of Congress. You will be famous because historians will be citing your diary for decades, maybe centuries to come.

What was he talking about?

For much of human history, which is to say roughly the past 10,000 years, a fundamental problem at the root of many challenges facing human societies has been a lack of adequate, timely information. This might be information in the form of intelligence about what one's enemies were up to, or information about changes taking place in trade patterns, or information about how to deal with a person with bloody purple pustules forming all over their body. We humans have come up with some pretty impressive ways of capturing and exchanging information, of getting it to the people and places where it was needed, everything from alphabets to libraries to postal systems to schools. Each of these unto themselves are really amazing creations. Consider that during the 10th century A.D. Abbasid caliphate of the medieval Arab empire(s), they developed a banking system that included checking accounts which ingeniously kept track of information about balances so that when Abdul made a deposit in Baghdad he could still write a check against that deposit hundreds of miles away in Tunisia and the local bank could make sure he had enough in his account to cover his check. And this was without phones or computers. However, despite all our most brilliant inventions, we've almost always still fallen short somehow, usually in the timeliness category. Just imagine how Romeo and Juliet would have ended if they both had iPhones.

Indeed, those iPhones are a part of a very different problem we face today, which is what Mr. McCullough was referring to. Today we still lack some kinds of information -- anyone out there know how to cure cancer yet? -- but we've pretty much solved the timeliness problem by creating global networks of instant communications that allow just about anyone anywhere to say anything to anyone else anywhere else on the planet. As a dramatic example of some of the implications of this kind of thing, consider the Brazilian tourist in Germany who used a security service website he had subscribed to to check on his home back in Sao Paolo, only to discover someone was breaking into his house. he called the local police in his hometown in Brazil and watched live as they entered his home and arrested the burglars -- all this from his hotel in Germany. Or, even more impressive, as the Syrian regime continues to wage war against its own citizens as they demand an end to dictatorship, I receive daily through Facebook phone images and videos sent by average Syrians chronicling the atrocities being committed by their own government against them. In 1991, the world was stunned to see a camcorder video showed on TV news programs showing Los Angeles police beating a helpless black motorist they had stopped, but in 2011, the world can watch daily mountains of (very bloody) evidence of the Syrian regime torturing and killing its own citizens. This is powerful stuff -- but that mountains of evidence bit is the problem. We now have, through the internet and other mobile telecommunications devices, access to mountains of information about, well, just about anything humans anywhere know about anything. The problem is now too much information, so much that it overwhelms us easily, and we are forced to develop filters. Those filters can be a problem if we choose bad filters which don;t give us the most meaningful or accurate information, but that's another discussion. What David McClullough was talking about was that the process of sharing all this information requires that it be digitized first, that it be sent electronically.

For historians, this is a disaster. Massive amounts of information are being exchanged daily on a level never before seen in human history, and yet in a hundred years' time, how much of all the e-mails, Tweets, Facebook updates or credit card transfers will be available for historians to pour through? If you read a history of the American Civil War, an important part of that history will include individual accounts by people who experienced those events, and that information has largely been captured from diaries or personal letters those people later wrote -- but nobody in 2011 keeps a diary (in book form, anyway) or writes letters through the mail. We send e-mails, we blog, we take pictures with our phones and send them to friends or post them on Facebook -- and it's all electronic. Will any of these still exist for historians in a hundred or a thousand years who are trying to understand how we in the early 21st century lived? And of course it's not just individual people; businesses are sitting on mountains of information, so much so that consulting firms make big $$$ nowadays showing them how to use that information to better understand what their customers want and how they shop or spend money, but again, all of this is electronic. We have tax and purchase receipts from ancient Sumeria 6,000 years ago, but will we have any from the 21st century to understand how and what people, businesses or governments were buying?

So the moral of this story is clear: do as Mr. McCullough suggests and start a paper-bound journal or diary, or better yet, print out this blog and save it somewhere.