Sarah Palin and Wikipediology

Some time back, I wrote a blog entry called "The Wikipedia and the Death of Archaeology." The thesis of the piece was this: archaeologists study periods as recent as a hundred years ago, because even with newspapers, magazines and photographs, a substantial percentage of everyday reality still slips through the historical cracks.

The humbling lesson is that much of our life is made up of trivial things - office supplies, flower pots, talk shows, you name it - that don't become the stuff of newspapers or novels. It follows that if you lose the trivia, then you lose much of the texture and context that makes everyday life real and understandable, if not always exactly inspiring.

Up until recently, archaeologists had to count peach pits in our ancestors' privies and the like to guess how people were living. In the future, though, they'll have the Wikipedia - and better yet, they'll be able to see how it changed.

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