Finally one of the more garrulous offshoots of the westbound throng babbled some frolicking buffalos onto the walls of a cave, the first step toward the New York Times.The Style and Financial sections still a long way into the future.
The first record keeping on a manufactured medium was a grocery list.Since the medium was manufactured out of clay it is easy to understand why they didn't get chatty with it, but still, they left a lot of details about their life and times to the imagination and deduction of graduate students past, present, and unborn.
By and by somebody found a sheepskin and wrote some bible stories on it.Word spread about this miraculous feat and others strove to duplicate it.This was progress.These stories related details about people: kings, prophets, generals.Even some mention of women; colorful women to be sure, like Jael and Deborah and Ruth. But as to their domestic arrangements or childhood diseases, hobbies, food fads, all of this is largely lost in the mists of time.
As time passed literacy spread beyond the scribes and clerics and before you know it people were writing diaries and books and poems. Many of these offered glimpses into the thoughts and lives of their authors.This private information was supplemented by pictures, paintings by young men with no useful skills. In general, the authors were men, since literacy was not high among the women and they were probably kept busy mending the Master's shorts and tending to the croupy babies and choosing an appropriate snood for tea with the bishop. Thus we have only the masculine account of life's annoyances and triumphs not only because most of the accounts were written by men but also because women had no voice except for the occasional queen or significant mistress. For this reason the conditions of childhood are virtually unknown, since children were entirely invisible, along with their nannies and the numerous mothers who were not queens or mistresses.
Before long, however, literacy began to spread, starting with the rich or at least the comfortable who didn't have to work 16 hour days, and soon the feminine slant emerged in the form of stories of romance: handsome brooding heroes and sensitive heart-broken heroines with a tendency toward the vapors. We get a good long look into the details of the household – what the upstairs maid did, what went on in the scullery, who slept with whom and what happened next.
The next phase of our plunge into self-revelation was the appearance of the penny-dreadfuls and the ladies magazines, closely followed by the confessional magazines, crime stories, specialized periodicals dealing with every imaginable interest: cookery, home décor, automobiles, pets, electronics, science, antiques, literature, travel, soft porn, baseball, agriculture, knitting, warfare, hard porn, and the intersection of any or all of these.Not to mention the movies and the TV shows, the miles of celluloid capturing interviews and stories and the behavior of giraffes. It is impossible to imagine that anthropologists of the future would have the slightest trouble finding out anything at all about Us and our world in the middle of the 20^th Century.
One dares to hope that the trend has peaked with the recent spate of public airings of a startling variety of personal flaws and peculiarities ranging from certain bizarre misunderstandings of the law as revealed to Judge Judy to the barely credible psychological kinks retailed on the many salacious interview shows in which seemingly normal people tearfully reveal to the panting viewing public their most private and embarrassing problems and perversions.
And then, among all this, there came the internet, and the slow rise of the online access to almost anything, and suddenly these media have started slowly slowly to transplant themselves from the grocers' shelves and tape libraries to The Cloud, byte by byte shifting from prime shelf space to some humming, windowless server farm, from a tangible, curatable object to electrons. All of the juicier segments from Dr. Phil and Oprah are currently available on YouTube and subscriptions to most of those special interest print publications are available online, with the rest either soon to follow or soon to fold.But where will all this information be in 20 years? 50 years? Files created less than 30 years ago on an obsolete computer and stored on the 8" floppy disks common at the time are gone. It is impossible to guess what improvements in operating systems or storage media will render today's archives unreadable, but for all our hypercommunication, social media, widespread literacy, online news outlets, it is entirely possible we have come full circle. That we will leave behind no more evidence of our lives for the archaeologists of the future than our forebears in the stone age. Such a tragic loss to Posterity that our descendants 100 or 1000 years hence will never know of our struggles to achieve orgasm, to cope with hair loss, to stamp out the evils of socialism. Will be denied the timeless wisdom of Geraldo and Rush Limbaugh.
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