Answer:
read hundreds, probably thousands, of letters," he recalls. "All of these messages were meticulously preserved and ordered in a family archive."
The Bakunins narrated their lives and relationships in great depth in those letters, bequeathing fascinating details to future historians such as Randolph, director of the Russian, East European and Eurasian Center at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
But what if he had had an archive of social media posts and photographs to work with instead?
Inevitably, the form and content of surviving records shapes the perspective of anyone who seeks to explore the past. That raises an interesting question for our age: if digital media survive long enough to be studied by future historians (though there's no guarantee that they will), how will that influence their judgements about us as people?
Casual text messages, emails and social media posts offer glimpses of unfolding events and opinions shared. Future historians will also likely have a rich understanding of what life during our time was like, thanks to gazillions of photos and video records. They'll be able to understand the body language and vocal intonations of someone in the 1990s, whereas we have relatively little idea of what these things were actually like in, say, the 1390s.
"One of the amazing things that's happening right now is we're getting a much fuller, rounder vision of the past that has much more material, it has more colour," says Randolph.
Films and TV shows, as well as personal photos, videos and social media posts, record in exquisite detail how people carry out daily tasks. The pressures they face. How they travel, eat and socialise. Never before in human history have we documented so excessively the minutiae of living
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