Suppose a researcher gets access to a several thousand year old Twitter server. The Lewis Mumford of 5934 AD might write a book called The Myth of Information about how researchers have misjudged the ancient 2000s by assuming that the stores of online communication and writing were particularly influential to the culture of “the real world”. It seems unlikely that the amount of information will continue to climb at its current rate for the next few thousand years, and some of that information will likely be lost to time, but there will still be an unfathomable data set of human writing, calculations, and communication available to future researchers. The exponential increase of digital information. When so much information is on the table, it is difficult for anyone to fully parse what is useful and true. The amount of information in the world is doubling every year and 93% of all information (as of 2003) ever created by humans was done so digitally.
In Martin Gurri’s book, The Revolt of the Public 2, he highlights the dramatic increase in the volume of information humans create. Researchers from the future may have the exact opposite problem from those of today: there will be too much information to make sense of.
It’s not unreasonable to suppose that researchers years from now will be able to sift through the data littered across the internet by previous generations. Unlike modern paleontologists, it is possible that future researchers will have knowledge of the machines we currently use and the precise information that was communicated through them.
But how much would knowledge of the inner workings of a MacBook Pro tap into what it was like to actually interact with others through that machine and how those interactions impacted daily life? Today’s most notable tools, the personal computer and the internet, will be impossible to ignore for historians thousands of years from now. When all that is left to be studied of a group is a singular aspect of their culture, one’s tendency is to filter all speculations about that culture through their few surviving artifacts. There is comparatively little to examine of ancient cultures in the way of their writings, textiles, art, etc. The misunderstanding arose because the only thing to study of very old peoples are their stone tools that could survive for long periods of time.
Lewis Mumford supposed that history has a misguided image of what ancient civilizations were interested in. Myth of the Machine is a revisionist reflection on human culture. As long as the paleoanthropologist regarded material objects - mainly bones and stones - as the only scientifically admissible evidence of early man’s activities, nothing could be done to alter this stereotype. And then in turn he has justified his present concerns by calling his prehistoric self a tool-making animal and assuming that the material instruments of production dominated all his other activities. Modern man has formed a curiously distorted picture of himself, by interpreting his early history in terms of his present interests in making machines and conquering nature.