Historians of the future

I find myself wondering what it will be like to be a historian in the future. If your period of interest is say the 2000s or the 2010s then, thanks to the internet, you are going to have more sources than you would ever be able to get through in a lifetime. Say for example you were covering the current phone hacking scandal there would be reams of material to read through. I guess future historians will have to become even more specialist in a particular area and selective in what they chose to read - otherwise they will have no hope of covering all the sources.

Journalists have to spend large amounts of time reading what people are saying over the internet, especially since the creation of social media sites like Facebook and Twitter. There is apparently a constant supply of young budding journalists keen to do this work for not much pay as a means of getting a foot in the door of the profession. A historian of the future covering events in the internet age will surely need a similar army of researchers to help him/her wade through the material? Whether he/she would have a similar number of youngster willing to work for low pay to help out is another question.

There is no doubt that historians of the future will also have to have excellent IT skills. The ability to focus in on the relevant sources will be particularly important given the vast number out there. I am certainly no technology expert but I would imagine that, for this reason, search engines will have to become ever more sophisticated so as filter out material that is not relevant.

Whilst feeling a little sorry for future historians because of the amount of material they will have to work through, there will certainly be no shortage of interesting events and issues for them to write about!