Lost to history

So, you reckon you know exactly what happened to you yesterday?  It’s not an unreasonable belief.

What about what your friend or colleague said happened to them? Any room for scepticism there?

Ok, now imagine that a week goes by, a few months, a year. And imagine that all of a sudden, you’re asked to document what had happened.
Now imagine it’s NOT modern day, without videos and audio and the internet at your disposal. It’s actually 200 years ago.

Sure, you have fact checkers who confirm things you were told, the things you hadn’t actually witnessed. There’s the media that had published a few articles. Heaps of people had told a similar story.  And your memory is top-notch (remembering exactly what you think is important). Right?

Done. It’s in the history books. People will be reading it for years and take it at face-value.

It’s not that hard to imagine.

So, what exactly hadn’t been written down that perhaps should have made it into the history books? And what exactly is inaccurate about what had been written down, all those years ago? I guess we’ll never know. And I suppose it is what it is.

But say you fast-forwarded to 100 years from now…

What will those people believe about our present day that had become ‘history’ to them? Will having the internet, with all the information in all the lands at their fingertips, make it easier or harder to sift through garbage to find the facts.

You and I understand this, but will our grandkids’ grandkids’ grandkids’? When the internet had allowed anyone to write whatever they wanted, for a century or more, until it had evolved into something we can’t actually foresee right now?

Let’s not think about it too much. No one will know the difference.