5 Ways Social Media Will Change Recorded History

http://mashable.com/2008/11/18/consequences-of-social-media/

An interesting concept. The author here states that because of things like blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and all sorts of this-is-what-i'm-doing-right-now technology, history will be recorded more accurately than before, and it will be easier then to reminisce with friends about what they were all doing on a certain day in the past.
I'm not sure this is as good of a thing as the author makes it out to be. For one thing, there is no need for me to remember what I was doing on every specific day in the past. And what if it was a bad thing, a fight that happened on that day? Does that need to be dragged out years later and re-aired? Even if the memories are good, the point of a memory is that something memorable happened. What's the point in saying "remember that day last July when we didn't do anything specific at all? Wasn't that awesome?"

The blogger here also states that, like the government using Google maps to track flu outbreaks, we'll be able to get so adept at tracking things like the spread of disease that they won't happen at all. I'm not sure about that. I think things are going to happen anyway, but we may be better able to track and/or contain them. Although I'm not sure what Google has to do with it. Now that coordinates are readily available from any mapping agency, we could do just as well with pushpins on the wall. It's just more convenient to do it online.

Besides - this isn't really changing recorded history. It's changing the way that our current time will be seen by future generations, or how we see ourselves now, but not how we see the past. If that were the point, I'd suggest the author head over to look at Europeana, the new EU-wide free online library that's housing video, audio, written record, and images from national libraries across the continent. That's going to help with recorded history; no more will we simply have to hear "the battle took place there," but we can see video footage (depending on the age of the battle; sources at the moment have video back to 1914 in this database), see digital reproductions of photos and paintings from various time periods, and communicate with people from where such events took place. In my opinion, that trumps the meager arguments of the above blogger any day.