It was a pair of Dolce and Gabana headphones that started this topic. I was scrolling through Instagram and came across the picture of Rhianna wearing them, they’re gold, ornamental, and topped with a dramatic crown. They cost £8,000approx. As I was looking at the picture, I thought that they looked like some things we’d find in a museum today, such as the gold wreath in the Greek section of the British Museum, or the crown at the Tower of London. And then I thought, in one-thousand years, would they be in a museum. Not just at a V&A flash exhibition, or being celebrated with a Met Ball, but actually exhibited as part of a permanent gallery about our current day and age? What would people think of us.
Naturally, as a historian, people always assume that I would always want to travel back in time, because I love history. And yes, sometimes this is the case. I would indeed love to go back and dine with the Caesars at one of their illustrious, and lethal, banquets, or join the Vikings as they sail East to Iceland. I’d love to go back and just see how the ordinary people lived, and to see how accurate our ideas about the past are. I would find it fascinating. But, for the most part I would love to go forward in time, and try to answer the questions that I continually ask, and can never answer, because I simply don’t know. While we have literature and archaeology to help us understand our past, and give us a pretty good picture of it, we don’t have anything that will tell us about the future. Mostly, because we are still creating it, and there are far too many unknown outcomes of it. All we can do, as humans, is predict. And much like people get stuck on predicting when the world will end, or even the outcome of tomorrow’s football match, I get stuck on what of us will survive.
In an increasingly electronic day and age, there’s a possibility that few records will remain. As technology advances, perhaps our current modes at recording and storing information will be out-dated, much like most computers now can’t support a floppy disc. Our memory sticks could become inscrutable, our CD’s obsolete and useless. How much information on these things risk becoming lost as mere gigabytes of unreadable data. Yes, on the internet more of us have a voice and a record than there perhaps ever was historically (also because most of us now are also literate) but as most of our writing is stored now largely as an intangible and ever-moving form, there’s a chance very few of our current culture, such as writing, information, tweets, pictures, and more, will disappear which is incredibly saddening to think about. (this is perhaps a whole other topic)
Even if our technological record manages to survive the turning of even decades, never mind centuries, what of us would be remembered. Certainly not my Facebook status from 2008, or your twitter post last week. Maybe, even this post won’t survive, doomed to the same fate as most other things, but what would. Would Wikipedia still exist as a form of information for the masses? What social media would be remembered? Perhaps none of it, because undoubtedly a millennium from now they’d have moved far from Snapchat, and WhatsApp much like we’ve distanced from Myspace, and Bebo. What music would survive? One Direction, and the other chart topping hits like Ed Sheeran, Taylor Swift, and Adele, to name a few. Or would the smaller, comparatively unknown artists be hailed as our time due to artistry or creativity instead, although it wouldn’t be as accurate of a representation to our Pop Culture tastes and ideas.
The same stands for our art, our cinema, our literature. For example, Van Gogh wasn’t appreciated as an artist in his time, and only sold one painting, but now his works are in galleries and museums across the globe and presented as an iconic artist of his day and age. I wonder, what people then would think of us, and therefore, who would be worshipped in the future. I go into bookshops and read great books, and among the mass of literary wonder, I wonder, what will become our classics, who will be our great authors. You can try to pin it down, but it’s impossible. It’s hard enough to mark anyone as a current contender, as there’s just such a sheer volume of culture to consume. We might be missing out on them today, never mind in the future, too. It was perhaps easy for an author to become eternally famous in the days of Austen, or Homer, when things such as literature, music, theatre, were smaller and there were fewer to go around. Although, in saying this, perhaps it’s not true. Perhaps Ovid also had to contend with thousands upon thousands of other poets. We simply don’t know because if that was the case the others simply haven’t survived. What literary masterpieces, have we lost over time already?
It’s fair to say that our material items will survive, as will our materialism. With tonnes of things we have made in factories, made from plastic which will take decades and decades to biodegrade, it’s likely that a lot of what we have today will survive as objects. The globe will still hold all our childhood toys, drinks bottles, and they’ll undoubtedly be seen as symbols of consumerism, consumption, and mass-production. Our landfill sites will survive as testimonies to this, much like the Monte Testacchio in Rome survives as an everlasting memorial to the number of Amphorae used during the Roman Empire. But surely more than our rubbish would survive. Surely, our trash would not be our icons in the future. Perhaps it will, perhaps not. There’s no way of telling. But then, if our trash is not their treasure, then what will be?
Would the Dolce & Gabana headphones end up in museums, or would it be something else? Would it be clothes from Primark that are equated to our society, or would people in the future assume that we all ran around in Valentino gowns or Prada trousers, much like we think of Togas when we think of the ancient past, although not even fifty percent of the population would have worn them. Not even fifty percent of men. What would be collected and placed in glass cabinets for everyone to see with little placards detailing information about us, that they’ve interpreted just from looking at our stuff. Would people think we all lived in apartment blocks, or recognise that some of us still lived in Tudor buildings? Would stately homes become the be all and end all, as those would be most likely to be preserved over longer periods of time, as the families within them stay there for longer compared to our rented flats and houses and metropolitan lifestyles? What would museums be like in the future? (arguably, another whole topic to delve into) How would they expand to fit us in? What would people think as they walked around and saw our things on display? And would that image of us be accurate, or far from what our reality is?
What more, of our current events? People will perhaps (sadly) remember the world once had Donald Trump as president, and in the future, he may be looked at with the same eyes we see the likes of Nero, or Hitler. Brexit will be remembered as a fundamental part of British and European history, but will people remember all the details or only the large bullet-points and paragraphs about money and politics that would go into the school textbooks about this time. What will be taught in schools? The way people reacted to things on the internet? Memes? Would people remember the social aspects of all of this, the refugees brought about by the conflict in Syria? It pains me to think that at some point such important aspects of today, and so many people, could one day be completely forgotten. It is the usual case that only the politicians and world leaders are the eternally famous people, as you look at the Kings and Queens, Presidents, and emperors over time, you see that is the case, but would the common people be forgotten to, as is the usual fate, or will the internet and our massive record now help us in keeping some of those every-day opinions and thoughts and people, alive? It might do, if our technology manages to stay, but we certainly can’t bank on it.
The thing is, as you’ve probably noticed, far more questions have been asked in this than I have managed to provide answers for. But I simply don’t have them, not while time-travel remains only a possibility on TV and in fantasy literature. I wish I could get in a time machine right now, and find out. Then, this question wouldn’t follow me around every day that I live my life, and see something spectacular, or take part in our society. But for now, all I can do is speculate, and watch to see how things will go over the fleeting period that I exist on the Earth. Dear people of the future, if somehow this post survives, and somehow, you’ve managed to make time travel possible, please come back to 16/07/2017 and let me know how things turn out. And take pictures!
The Muse Talks 