There is serendipity in what gets recorded in history like you say, but there’s also power and politics. And nowadays with everybody recording everything and classroom assignments including blog reading, history may be taking a turn towards something less iron-clad, more slippery, more idiosyncratic and more fair.

Erasing history seems like a false problem, to me. The implication that erasing bits and bytes is necessarily a bad thing is questionable. Most of that can be lost without our missing them. Historically, most of the things we now consign to bits and bytes (and then never erase) would never have been recorded in the first place. Is an announcement on Facebook that you’re taking a break to use the bathroom history worth recording? It sure is worth erasing. And then there’s the stuff we all have stored on our computers and in backup that we never look at again. Surely we could live without it.

What’s troubling is that the first level of editing out what’s boring is not taking place. So we spend extra time inputting it, then reading it, then decided whether to keep it or not. We have a massive storage system filled with what?

Historical artifacts that remain survive because of serendipity. I don’t think what’s recorded now will survive in a more rational way–or in a less rational way.

As for the other half of her proposition, it’s true and not true and fun to think about.