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Re:'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life by newswasboring on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:37PM (#26583751)
This is weird. History, at least as it's colloquially used, is a accounting of important events in the past. We study history so we don't make major mistakes. Surely you are not implying everything online is important?
Re:'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life by tablespoon on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:58PM (#26584005)
> This is weird. History, at least as it's colloquially used, is a accounting of important events in the past. We study history so we don't make major mistakes. Surely you are not implying everything online is important?

That's an extremely limited, pretty old-fashioned view of history. There was literally a post just the other day about Latin grammatical genders that mentioned that linguists obsess over a few fragments of graffiti because that's all that's left that hints at how Latin was actually spoken by the commoners whose speech became the Romance languages. Other historians spend their time studying contracts and receipts from transactions involving cattle and grain of long dead Sumerian traders. There are many schools of history that are more concerned with how common people lived in ordinary and extraordinary times than great men and "important events" (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History#Social_history). An important function of history is satisfying people's curiosity about the past.

Re:'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life by PeterisP on Thursday March 25, 2021 @02:47PM (#26583873)
History does study and consider important records and artifacts that inform us about daily life of ordinary people in that time and place, it's not limited to "important events" according to some measure of importance.

For example, we consider valuable early writing on clay tablets that refers to accounting records, recipes and personal letters of ancient Mesopotamia (e.g. https://www.archaeology.org/issues/214-features/cuneiform/43...) which provide insight on how these people lived even if they provide no information on any specific major event.

Re:'Remember the Internet': An Encyclopedia of Online Life by andrewzah on Thursday March 25, 2021 @03:00PM (#26584023)
History is not only for important events. It's also important to understand the daily lives of past civilizations. A lot of mundane stuff was simply never written down, so we'll never know in a lot of cases.

One unique problem of our era is storing things digitally. If a huge event were to occur, wiping out humanity, archeologists won't be able to study ssds in thousands of years like we can study physical artifacts today.