New Year, New Ideas - How will History be written?

Happy New Year, or should I say Happy Hogmanay? I recently got back from visiting the wonderful city of Edinburgh to ring in the New Year, but in the process of looking back at the last year, we can’t help but look to the future, too. So, here are some thoughts based on our discussions around the piano last night. 

History is a discipline which famously looks to the past, and rarely do historians think of the future. While many of us sit and think about what events of history could have changed, and by extension, how this would have impacted us today, we rarely look at the future of it as a subject. Sure, those of you who follow my blog will know that I spend a lot of time thinking about the future of history in places like higher education. However, this post looks at something different. Below, I outline some of the weird and wonderful ways I think the history of ‘now’ will evolve to be told in the future. 

Sources

We live in a digital age that has profoundly shifted how historical sources will be accessed. The source material we put out is stronger than any other historical period. This makes me wonder, in the past, for example, in the medieval period, rarely did the everyday average Joe Bloggs get to write out their thoughts. Now more than ever, people can do this either online or offline. I think that the most fascinating source material will be how the everyday person interacts with history as it unfolds. We have seen the social media boom in this millennium, with sites such as X (formerly Twitter) used to share opinions on events as they unfold. Could this be the start of the richest social record in human history?

With everyone seemingly a critic, imagine how fortuitous the historians of the future will be in the sources they have. Let’s examine the figure, President Trump of the United States. His electoral loss in 2020 prompted various forms of protest in the United States, some of which were fueled by social media. This medium is a rich tool for understanding how everyday people can put out their grievances and find like-minded people who agree with them. Various clips of President Trump were put out, encouraging individuals to come and campaign against the electoral loss. Similarly, his second term as President has received wide-ranging commentary online, from critical to comedic; he has truly experienced a wide range of views. However, social media will not just be an invaluable source for everyday responses to serious events such as elections, but also for pop-cultural developments. Social media’s record of public reaction to major events, like elections, shows how historians of the future will reconstruct not just events but emotions and interpretations.

Visual sources such as Instagram Reels or TikToks present accessible and engaging content that should be considered in how society engages with itself. Historians of millennia to come will be able to see how we entertained ourselves and, to be short, will be met with quite a selection. From the good to the bad, if all of this source material exists, it will provide an incredibly rich foundation for understanding how our society runs and why people interact with significant historical events (e.g., elections) through meme or video culture. But what if this material ceases to exist? How can we ensure that sources are preserved?

Writing History - Reliable Narrators and Source Longevity? 

One of the key issues we discussed on Hogmanay was who gets to write history, and how it survives. So, who does get to write history? Well, the answer, as I have tried to outline above, is that in the future it could be anyone. And how fascinating, and utterly terrifying this sounds to us - everyday people. Now, in the past, very few people could read or write (that is a massive oversimplification, but stay with me), and now we have the beauty of anyone can write for any purpose. Anne Frank’s Diary is one of the world’s greatest literary accounts of how an individual continued to live and exist throughout the most horrific of times. Anne never knew her diary was going to be read and published for the world to see. So, diary entries from the days of the COVID-19 pandemic may very well become primary source material one day. 

While the ability to write history is now well and truly with everyone, the question of whether or not it will survive is also important. Digital sources - like those made on social media - ultimately rely on the technological infrastructure to support them. As most users of these sites know, the material is backed up on their servers. So, if they crash, get hacked, or are not backed up, the likelihood of these sources continuing to exist will be brought into question. The timescale of these will also be important, as individuals may choose to delete their posts (reducing the source pool), or posts become so distant they become hard to find. Although, this is likely an issue that historians (and those working within the historical field) will overcome. It is often the case that sources are rediscovered many hundreds of years after their creation. In the future, we could design applications and software to filter posts to a specific period and examine them closely through keyword searches. (Although in saying this, if this post still exists in hundreds of years, I am sure they will have much more advanced technology than what I am describing.) The evolution of society must accompany an evolution in how we study and interpret the past; without it, we will cease to understand the world we live in. 

Closing Thoughts

History as a discipline will evolve over the years to come. While History, as a study at most modern universities, did not take off until the late 19th century (at Oxford, it was called Ancient and Modern History), its future will depend on what we create now. Those tweets, diaries, and photos will shape how future historians (if the discipline is called history) interpret the past. These will constitute a social foundation, and, as such, we must engage with the now as a conversation among us, the past, and the future. 

So, as you make your New Year’s resolution, think about history - not just the past, but to the future sources too!