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« Tuna 2 / 2018

Sending Historical Monuments on Beforehand

Historical monuments as such can be differentiated from the conscious informing of the future about what has been. This is a relatively new phenomenon and is associated with changes in people’s perception of time, when the linear dimension emerged alongside cyclicality. This was able to take place in the Modern Era as life’s overall tempo speeded up, when life already changed over the course of a person’s lifetime. Then the idea could emerge that the future will differ substantially from the present and that perhaps it would be necessary to inform the future about one’s own society. It is quite likely that nowadays the future is being informed more than ever before. Signals are even being sent to other galaxies. Nevertheless, some means of information are languishing. For instance, grand realistic literature, which hitherto was an invaluable means for getting to know social history, is hardly trendy. The number of e-mail letters far exceeds the volume of traditional correspondence, but their content says little about people’s way of thinking. The same goes for replacing diaries with blogs. For this reason, it is more and more difficult to write in-depth biographies, which are the best means for getting to know any particular era. In short, it will not be easy for the future historian to write a truthful book entitled The 21st Century Human Being.