Opinion: Facebook is becoming a vast digital graveyard — and a gift to the future
By Robert Gebelhoff Robert Gebelhoff Opinions contributor focusing on health, science and public policy. Email Bio Follow Assistant editor and Opinions contributor May 8 at 4:22 PM Some 30,000 years ago, before writing was invented, there was one way for people to leave a record behind for future generations. They would place their hand on cave walls and blow pigments over it, leaving behind a hand print. It was a successful strategy: Many of these haunting marks survive today.
Anthropologists and social historians have always struggled to tell the stories of our everyday ancestors, even those who lived only a few generations prior. Written records offer us a great deal of insight into a handful of important people, but piecing together information about ordinary people has been more complicated.
Today, tens of millions of dead Facebook users have left behind such digital remains, but this is set to increase exponentially in the coming decades. A new paper by Oxford University researchers estimates that if Facebook stopped growing tomorrow, the number of deceased users on the site would hit 1.4 billion by the end of the century. If the site were to continue growing as it is now, that number could reach about 5 billion users by the year 2100.
“For the first time in history, we have a chance to truly democratize history,” said Carl J. Öhman, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute and co-author of the paper. “Now finally we have an archive that encompasses all of us — on a global scale.”
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