HISTORIANS COULD STUDY YOUR TIKTOKS ONE DAY

Zoomers have heard the same phrase from well-meaning adults throughout their lives: “Once it’s on the internet, you can’t take it back.” And generally, that’s solid advice. The last thing you want is for colleges to stumble upon a screenshot of an embarrassing social media post you made and then promptly deleted. Perhaps more interesting, though, is the bigger picture of online preservation.

Over the past 25 years, an everincreasing portion of human activity has moved onto the internet. It has given rise to social movements, political scandals and new ways of relating to the world. But compared to the traditional ways of keeping records, like newspapers, the internet is fleeting. One leading digital preservation initiative, the Internet Archive, puts it this way: “Most societies place importance on preserving artifacts of their culture and heritage… Our culture now produces more and more artifacts in digital form. The Archive's mission is to help preserve those artifacts and create an Internet library for researchers, historians, and scholars.”

A great illustration of how this works is the Wayback Machine. Launched in 2001, it allows users to travel back in internet history to visit web pages or websites that have since been deleted or modified. Go back to 2006 to visit the now defunct social media platform MySpace, or see how events were reported in real-time by perusing the records of any online news outlet. It’s a truly fascinating tool, whether used to relive the glory days of mid-2000s web design or to understand contemporary reactions to recent historical events.

While today’s historians are limited in their access to primary sources, written at the time the event in question took place, tomorrow’s historians will be able to access a vast array of sources to any given event. Traditionally, historians have had to wrestle with the limitations of their primary sources, because they often represented the views of privileged social groups; after all, widespread literacy regardless of race, class or gender is a relatively recent development. Social media has further lowered the barrier of sharing one’s opinion.

The implications of the rise of digital history are wide-ranging, if not a little humorous to those of us who were raised on technology. It’s not unrealistic to imagine a researcher two hundred years from now writing a scholarly article analyzing the TikTok trends of the 2020s or the impact of memes on the politics of 2016-2020. To the content creators of this today, this might seem absurd, but these posts provide a valuable window into how people living in the year 2023 relate to the events around them. So the next time you go to post something questionable, you might need to be prepared to explain it not only to colleges today, but to your grandchildren fifty years from now.