Here's my take, perhaps a little far fetched.

At some point around 5000 years ago writing emerged. People wrote down things like “such and such is the king of all the world. He is the son of such and such.” If these things survived and we have them today, we call that history. There’s a convention of dating the beginning of history to the first writing and calling everything before that prehistory. The specifics are cloudy and debatable. Does it count if we can’t read it? Does it count if it’s not classifiable as “writing.” If people paint a cave and we understand they were talking about hunting aurochses with spears, then we know there were some people here that hunted aurochses with spear. Does that count as writing?

Vague semantic lines aside, there’s an idea here that’s interesting. When people can write about something as it happens and put that information down, that’s history. The historical age. There’s something to that, an important difference between information communicated to us by people of that time rather than us knowing by studying less direct artefacts.

All this writing, all this history, has been accelerating like most technology. Every century (except for a few bumpy patches) we’ve been mooing more of it, making more history. More places, people perspectives, details. We’ve added pictures (if cave painting don’t count, are paparazzi snaps of Kardashian’s arse out too?) and video, 3d images, seismographic data and a whole lot of other stuff to that pile. History is exploding. Terry’s History Monks must be having fits.

Anyway, say we move forward a bit and say the current trends keep going for that bit. CCTVs are now omnidirectional. The cops finally agreed to wear body cams, but insist that the crooks wear them too and the politicians while we’re at it. Computers can rewind every bit that ever flipped. Since everyone has an ear-chip and a groin-chip installed (google glass was the last attempt at okular recording devices, too invasive), our lives are recorded fully. Psychology finally works because instead of asking about your mother, a guy with a 19th century bohemian accent just becomes you as a suckling babe for a bit and figures out what went wrong. Maybe he reads her old tweets.

I think that’s a new age. I know this gets us into naming convention problems when the next age comes, but I’d like to call it posthistory. The period before people recorded their commentary on events, the period when they did and the period when everything was recorded in full.

I actually do think that’s coming and I do think it will be a profound change. I think we’re in a sort of grey transitional period where not everything is recorded, but sufficiently more than in previous times that we’re back to troubling questions “do symbolic representation systems that only have symbols for tax related concepts like cheese, beer and god-kings count as real writing and therefore history,” but with a more posthistoric flavour and copyright issues. If Maldu of unya

Oh, and I think bit rot will get solved, unless zombies or meteors or something. Shuruppak sent a note to Labek telling him not to screw around with married women 5000 years ago and we can still read it. I think we can preserve “LOL UR mom is crazy!!!!!”