What will 2020 look like in our future history books?
Thankfully the year 2020 has come and gone, and as we are nearing the end of 2021 I thought I'd take some time to reflect on the history we lived through and documented these past 2 years. 2020 will definitely be a year to remember, but how will it be remembered. Some may find it odd, but I believe that a lot of our future primary sources when studying the history of 2020 will come from social media. Through social media people documented the global pandemic, racial injustice, protests & politics. Millions of stories of the effects of COVID-19 are preserved in a post or tweet. It will be interesting to see how and in what ways future historians use social media platforms as a source of history.
Are Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter a reinvented diary for the 21st century? In a few of my history classes last semester, one of my teachers assigned a video for us to watch about a women who was a midwife in Massachusetts before the American Revolution. The video documenting her life and the era that she lived in was made from using her personal diary. It captured her daily life, the political atmosphere, the society she lived in. Who's to say that personal posts documenting events can't do the same thing.
With everything being digital hopefully a lot more stories and experiences can be saved, preserved, and told to future generations.