After the party the host sent out a thank you note along with a link to a collection of snapshots, including the video he screened that night showcasing the life of his wife, the birthday girl. It was a wonderful remembrance of a fun gathering, one that was a singular event in space and time. As a historical record it may someday be of interest to an archivist, though it's unlikely to have significant impact beyond those in attendance. Still, unless it's deleted out of the cloud, it will probably stay safely ensconced in some data center from now until the end of time, available to anyone who cares to find it.
Contrast that with what we know about, say, Shakespeare. Almost every detail of his personal life is a guess, educated though it may be. For all of the words he wrote that are venerated and performed, what we know of him as a person is much thinner. There are the bare facts of his marriage and children, as well as his work as an actor and playwright. But so little is actually known about his life that scholars call the seven years after his children were born "the lost years." As Ian McEwan writes in his new novel, "What We Can Know," there are no new facts, only new angles.
The opposite of that is someone like Churchill. Though in a different genre, he also wrote voluminously, and many wrote about him. There are journals and diaries, correspondence and notes, in one archive alone over 800,000 pages. Through first, second and third hand observations and recollections, we know chapter and verse of the man and his life.
Between those two extremes lie the rest of the people who existed in those times, people like most of us: the shopkeepers, the tradesmen, the homemakers, the bookkeepers. Unless they did something exemplary or atrocious, we likely barely know of their existence, let alone the details of their lives. There might be the odd person who penned a letter which is discovered years later in an attic or folded into the back of a book. From that we might glean something about their lives or their thoughts and their outlook on the world. But as for an extensive record? To say we know little about them is charitable at best.
Fast forward to today. For sure, those of note whose names appear above the fold like Will or Winston have their comings and goings, their thoughts and musings, well documented. Future chroniclers of their lives will have no shortage of material from which to work when describing their existence and their impact. There will be no need for conjecture, for it will be all spelled out in a collection whose biggest problem will not be its scarcity but its size.
But unlike in times gone by, every single one of us is also creating the same type of staggeringly massive contemporaneous record. It is an annotated transcript of what we think, what we say, what we do, what we see and how we're seen. We place it not in some impenetrable vault but rather in a publicly accessible central database, guarded, if at all, by the most cursory of security protocols. Should some future curious individual want to, that Saturday night party would be there for the taking, showing what we wore, what we ate, who we were with and more. Cross referenced with the emails, texts, phone records and search histories gleaned from the WhatsApp contact info, they could recreate it completely to be all but a clone.
As McEwan writes, "We have robbed the past of its privacy."
Is that a bad thing? It's your call. We talk about leaving our mark on the world, creating something of permanence that will endure once we are gone. In the past that took a deliberate effort, taking an action or building a thing that would withstand the test of time. But that's hardly necessary anymore. Estimates are that we are online over a third of our lives, with each interaction leaving multiple digital breadcrumbs. True, someone would have to want to find it, but odds are that the raw data will be kicking round for a very long time. The bottom line is that while we may be lost in history, we are no longer lost to it.
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Marc Wollin of Bedford appears in many databases, only some of which he knows about. His column appears weekly via email and online on Substack and Blogspot as well as Facebook, LinkedIn and X.
