The end of insignificance

I’ve made the point in passing that we might well pity the future historian, dealing with the awesome morass of personal documentation that is one of the hallmarks of the present. The scrapbooks, the professionally edited DVDs of a million weddings, the limitless digital self-data. Science fiction writer Charles Stross has a more upbeat view about it:

Some time after our demise, this information will be available to historians.

And what a mass of information it will be…

They’ll be able to see the ephemera of public life and understand the minutiae of domestic life; information that is usually omitted from the historical record because the recorders at the time deemed it insignificant but which may be of vital interest in centuries to come.