How will technology affect historians?

Question

The last two decades are more documented than any other decade due to the Internet.

How do you think this will affect history?

Answer 1

It will be incredibly difficult to vet information, that is to check information for accuracy, since everything on the Internet is so unfiltered. Think about how many screen names you have for different venues, how does an historian correctly identify an author? (Can you see your grandchild's history exam? Explain in 50 words or less how "Beanybaby4ver" influenced the writer "Stck_crk_ntt" to start a new politcal party in the early 21st century.)
Like some technologies, it may become difficult to retrieve the information when current reader machines are no longer current. (Do you have in your home a cassette player, an 8 track tape player, a reel to reel tape player, or a phonograph?)
Very few people send messages or letters on paper any longer, they use e-mail. Does everyone keep all their e-mails or do tons of them get deleted every day? Since the beginning of the written word, historians have relied on letters and diaries/journals for first person accounts of all of human interaction. How would they access old e-mails, blogs, etc. in 100 years or 500 years?
Since the Internet was never designed for the volume of traffic on it now, scientists are already talking about inventing an alternative Internet. What happens to the existing information?
How will any one historian or any team for that matter, be able to sift through all the dross of every person with a keyboard who becomes a writer of sorts? It's not going to be a matter of finding enough material, it's going to be a matter of making sense of and editing way too much information.

Answer 2

Future historians will have to become digital archaeologists and have a grasp of past technology and programming to access data created with by what may be by then obsolete hardware and software.

Historians will have access to the thoughts,concerns and lifestyles of the "ordinary" people on a scale and in depth as they never have had before in the study of history.

Answer 3

The same way technology has always affected history.

Think of the development of the following technologies: speech; writing; ink; printing presses; television; film; radio.

History is not what happened; it is what we choose to remember, and the MEANING(s) we attibute to it. History is the stories we tell, to define ourselves.

Answer 4

It will make us crazy trying to keep up with the latest technology. We will sit around 24 hour resturants with Lap tops muttering to ourselves about the good old days of paper and pencil..