The Preservation Paradox

Abstract

Perhaps it is historians’ special way of shaking a fist at the image of their own mortality, but every generation must lament that its artifacts, its milieu, will largely be lost to history. One can find countless laments in the early days of recording about what might have been had we just been able to get Lincoln’s, or the speeches of some other great leader, on a cylinder. But one can just as easily turn to one’s own professional journals, such as the Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television. Here is Phillip M. Taylor, a historian at Leeds, making the case for “preserving our contemporary communications heritage” in 1995: In 2095, when history students look back to our century as we now look back to the nineteenth, they will read that the twentieth century was indeed different from all that went before it by virtue of the enormous explosion in media and communications technologies … But when they come to examine the primary sources for this period, they will alas find only a ramshackle patchwork of surviving evidence because we currently lack the foresight, let alone the imagination, to preserve our contemporary media and communications heritage. By not addressing the issue now, we are relegating our future history to relative obscurity and our future historians to sampling and guesswork. (Taylor, 1996, p. 420)