Biographers and their dwindling numbers

The fact that we know enough about historical people to fill hours of primetime television on slow news days is down to the excellent work of historians and more importantly, the biographers who followed said people and chronicled their experiences. Clearly people like Napoleon had the luck of the draw in the selection of biographers, as against, say Bertrand Russell, a Brit of extraordinary achievements in the field of mathematics and logic and remarkable contributions to causes such as the women's suffrage movement; yet who apparently stood out to many of his peers because of his 'bad breath'. With a biographer able to assert such power over the very history we look to, what problems are keeping their numbers down? 

The early biographers were, of course, employed in the royal courts. That meant any creative liberties taken to glorify the ruler were rewarded with ornaments, and any attempts made to point out flaws in the empire were rewarded with a noose. Since wearing the ornaments was a more preferable option than a noose, many of the biographies written in the historic era tend to lean towards being fantastical. Modern historians look through their façade by accessing documents written by other people of the same era and analyzing them. Thus being a biographer was difficult in historic times as your neck was generally the place where you got feedback for your work. 

The biographers of the modern day, however, are a completely different kettle of fish. A reader might find two biographies written about a person. One might lead him to believe the individual is the greatest person to ever have lived, and the other might lead him to believe the same individual is the scum of the earth. He must then reconcile his views in an explosively loud debate regardless of the thoughts and opinions of others. We call this process the 9 o’clock news. Being a biographer in the modern day is therefore difficult as you carry the burden of presenting a version of history without the masses tweeting you into oblivion should a sentence stray on their bad side. However, I believe it is the biographers of the future who are the unluckiest of the lot because of a single major transformation in the means of communication: e-mail.

 If the biographers of the future are to continue the trend of analyzing communications to comment on people, the greatest tool in their kit will be a password guesser for email accounts. The resulting observations will be the most hilarious piece of literature to ever have been thought of. To prove my point, I took a look at my own email inbox from an outsider’s perspective, and here are my observations about myself.

 To start with, I seem to be a wildly popular person as there are more than 29000 emails I have not gotten around to reading yet. I also seem to be an important person because there are some mails I have marked as such and yet remained unopened, for perhaps somebody reading them on my behalf. I seem to have lived in a cave, as there are tens of mails stating somebody ‘has posted on my Wall’. Either that or I seem to have entertained extremely rude house guests. I am certainly very wealthy because there are unopened communications informing me I have ‘won £ 950,000,00 pounds in our BMW on-line promo’. The only conclusion is that this sum of money is too paltry to be bothered with and BMWs are just not my taste. A later communication confirming the booking of a Honda confirms this particular suspicion. I shopped like a madman, got universities from at least four countries vying to teach me and got interested in English football at some stage. 

In the later parts of my inbox adventure, I seem to be looking to buy two houses a month for around four years till the communications suddenly stop, with the obvious interpretation that I have purchased at least one of those. Quite a leap from people writing on my wall, truth be told. Companies across industries and countries are soliciting my services on through a Glass Door. Credit card companies seem to consider me to be the marketing version of Patient Zero, as there are all kinds of offers being sent my way, again with no attention spared. I ignore mails with stock tips with ‘secret information- 1500% upside guaranteed’, proving my distaste for insider trading and establishing my ethical assertive. Polygamy seems to be back in vogue in my time as a mail from a matrimonial website sits just above a mail from my wedding photographer wishing me on my anniversary, but mails from certain businesses selling questionable performance enhancing drugs point towards the possible inadequateness I feel despite seemingly having the world at my feet. Good luck to anyone who fancies interpreting all of that in the future.

 

However, unlike the biographers of today, the biographers of tomorrow have a common enemy. Biographies of the future might simply be printed and bound screenshots of an individual’s social media activity, and that could tell more about them than any biographer worth their salt. History is being made every day, but only time will tell if it is being recorded in a manner worth being investigated by future historians.