When I wrote a paper in my freshman seminar about the (very large) influence of John Locke on America’s founding fathers, I retrieved a volume of letters exchanged between former U.S. presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, Class of 1771. Every letter I looked at was composed in full, coherent sentences, and these two weren’t just writing about their plantations. They were arguing about the curriculum for the law school at the University of Virginia, discussing the Federalist Papers and plotting politics. I found the volume because I checked the bibliography in some biographies on the two statesmen that I had already retrieved. This was the raw stuff of history.
So in 2060, will biographies of eminent gentlemen and ladies contain sleek, bright, illustrated inserts of their facebook.com profiles? (Assuming, of course, that books are still printed and that we’re all not toting around Amazon Kindle 9.9s.)
Much has been made about the potential embarrassment of an employer checking an undergraduate’s Facebook page. But on the internet, nothing ever really goes away (at least not as long as Google keeps archiving everything). And just last month Facebook quietly claimed the legal right to own its users’ profiles in perpetuum, which was enough to provoke a rebellion on consumerist blogs and a very public news article in The New York Times. Staff writers at The New Yorker — of all places — shut down their profiles in protest.
Facebook undid the policy after about a week of fury, but the company still maintains a permanent record of one’s profile even after an account has been “deleted.” Sure, the scandal du jour is politicians who won’t pay their taxes — whatever happened to that 36-page questionnaire for Obama administration employees? — but I see a rising generation of politicos who will spend the rest of their lives denying the things they said online, and the photographs they put there. The attack ads in ’36 are going to be very nasty, or very funny, depending on your point of view. Diamonds are forever, but Facebook never dies.
Possibly this will all be a wash: After all, President Obama did drugs, admitted it and moved on. Yet I can’t help thinking that photographs will make the material so much more delectable to the opposition and so much more entertaining for the public. So to that girl I know who’s got a profile pic where she’s shoving beer bottles down her pants: Think twice about elected office.
To me, though, as an avid history buff, the real interest is in the wealth of information that will be available to future historians. When Cicero was making his name in the Roman Senate, he wrote hundreds of letters to his best friend Atticus, who was living in (very) early retirement at Athens. Whenever Atticus came to Rome for a visit, the letters dried up. So today, classicists have a devil of a time figuring out what was going on in a few crucial gaps of late Republican history, and all because one wealthy playboy decided to shift his residence for a few months. Our window into Cicero’s mind was shut.
In 2060, historians will have tens of thousands of e-mails, PDA records, Microsoft Outlook schedules and Blackberry accounts to wade through, complete with time stamps to record the very second in which a future Nobel novelist or Senate majority leader asked his or her professor for an extension on that philosophy paper. When art historians in London announced this week that maybe — just maybe — they’d found their second-ever painting of William Shakespeare, it rocked the world of Shakespeare studies. Imagine looking at the Bard’s “photos” tab on Facebook. (Photos of Will and you: 0.)
Sure, there’ll still be laws about privacy, and presumably singers, golfers and popes will be allowed to choose which biographers get access to their phone records and which do not. But while Norman Sherry may be the only man alive who can read Graham Greene’s most intimate diary entries (and the only biographer alive who has caught every single disease that his subject ever did while tracking his footsteps across the globe), if a future novelist puts his juvenilia on a blog, anybody will be able to read it. And if the next Elvis Presley is warbling away on YouTube, no last will and testament will remove that song from the internet. It’s out there, and it will stay out there, forever.
To the future-famous, this must sound like a nightmare. Historians might well regard this development with equal trepidation; they, after all, are the ones who will have to schlep through a lot of badly abbreviated “lol omg wuts up bff 4eva!” We may yet see a new course in the history department — HIS 409: Deciphering Internet Graffiti from the Great Recession.
Somehow, I can’t help thinking the history majors will probably enjoy that.
Brendan Carroll is a sophomore from New York. He can be reached at btcarrol@princeton.edu.
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