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I'd like to point out that "revisionism" is even scarier in the digital age. Once you print a book/magazine/newspaper. It's done and locked down on what you said. You can't exactly take it back. Other than saying, "Hey, I was wrong" or whatever. I'm not talking about small errors or whatever. More, the general topic. Like, in the USA during the Bush 2 administration and prior, Democrats were against illegal immigration and Republicans were for it. Now, it's reversed. Hell, even Obama was for a lot more border security during his Senate days. But that changed during his run for presidency. (Broad brush strokes on the issue, obviously far more nuanced of a topic, I'm not on a hill for one or the other right now. This is strictly about the fact of their standpoints changing, nothing else. Calm your political panties.) In the digital age of easy deleting and altering information, are we going to get to the point on trouble judging what is "historical fact" even more so than ever? One simple thought, think of all the old racist cartoons from the Disney, Looney Toons era. Some more racist than others. But, lets say all of it is burned, deleted and gone. Hell, the old film reels aren't going to last too much longer anyways. 40 or 50 years from now, there's no actual proof of it existing except for some articles saying "there were racist cartoons by XYZ creator". Alright, prove it. "Well, it says here." But where is the actual cartoon? To be fair, a lack of evidence makes it hard to believe it ever happened. It's pretty fair, at that point, for someone to deny the cartoons ever happened. Especially since we're becoming a far more "evidence" based culture with a lack of anecdotal belief. A random blogger saying "XYZ existed" isn't proof either... because obviously you can't lie on the internet... cough cough. Photoshoping, deep fakes... the whole think of what "happened" is a scarier concept. At some point, do we just not trust a single damn thing on the internet? I do know it's difficult to really wipe anything off the internet. Mostly due to the distributed nature and freedom of speech aspect of it... but I think a lot of people have to agree, both of those attributes are being threatened. Preserving history, no matter the sensitivity of it is pretty important. Weird rant that's marginally related, but it's something that's been bothering me a lot the past few years. The "book burning" problem is going to get worse at this rate unless some major cultural changes happen. |
Best thing on twitter I've seen is basically a list of NYT diffs: https://twitter.com/nyt_diff?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp...