Isometric Histories

What does the future look like once we have been heavily engaged in social media for twenty or thirty years?

Everytime we make a status update, upload a photo or make a comment on facebook we are creating a datapoint. These datapoints are interesting for a number of reasons …

1. They are captured in real-time. Feelings and points of view are recorded instantly, events and incidents usually within 24hrs.

2. They are contextualised. Comments from our network frame the datapoint with reference to others.

3. They are recorded in the third person.

This means that heavy social networkers are recording their own history as it happens. But this history is different.

History is traditionally understood to be the objective construction of incomplete and varied sources into an accurate chronological record of past events. Objectivity and accuracy not withstanding, history is always written after the fact. This adds perspective. It is impossible for us to document past events after the fact without viewing them through the lens of all that has gone between. Traditional history has perspective.

But social media enables pre-contextualised real-time third person chronological records to be produced. This is history without perspective. This is isometric history.