Aside from losing digital content and the ability to retroactively change it, electronic news also saps future researchers from all the clues historians use to put that news in context. Microfilm of old newspapers, for instance, gives us what newspaper people call “placement and play” information—what stories warranted being above the fold on the front page? What stories were buried deep in the classified section? What type of stories got large headlines? What stories surrounded the story on each page that might provide context as to what else was going on that day?
When modern digital stories are saved as individual pages, it will rob them of this type of related context.
“Both the placement and play of the story was an indication of the news judgment – who thought what was important,” said Hansen. “Even now, it’s hard to do that on websites. They’re constantly changing the headlines and the placement based on clicks.”
According to Hansen, the whole notion of news judgment and placement and play are now gone. “Going forward, there’s not going to be any way to understand that,” she said.
Paul noted that for this reason, historians who rely on Twitter could find two completely different sets of facts based on whose feed they decide to exhume.
For one, tweets contain very little information content, given they are strings of a few short words with very little context around them.
“How do you understand whether a tweet was intended as snark, or a hard-felt fact, or what? The whole way that communication is happening now will make historical work very difficult,” said Paul.
Hansen likened the search for history in Tweets to ancient Rome, where the waterways were lined with lead. As the Roman Empire was crumbling, the people who were in charge were crazy because of lead poisoning.
“What I say now is that we are living in a toxic information environment. It’s not toxic water, it’s toxins in the information stream. We are suffering the consequences of that,” she said.
Of course, the news available to future historians will depend on who decides to invest the funds to preserve their copy. This will mean the enduring stories told about modern times will come from those who can afford to mold the narrative into the future. (This is not particularly new; newspapers have historically been owned by wealthy individuals with the resources to preserve their version of the present.)
But this will likely create a patchwork of news sources whose veracity it will be difficult to ascertain in hindsight.