No, no, no -- we got extraordinarily lucky that Shakespeare's works survived. He wasn't considered the god of the English language then as he is now -- just popular. And if not for the unasked-for work of a couple of his friends, we wouldn't have any of his plays. Period. Huge argument against oral history, really: it's a fucking miracle we have the Iliad.

An argument you cling to with no evidence whatsoever. Using your own example, if Newton were you, our perspective on Newton would be a bunch of news clippings.

But Newton's not me! Half the people in the world use Facebook, and they're all different and use it in various different ways. To claim that historians in 500 years are only going to have bullshit left from the age of info-vomit on the early internet is ridiculous pure and simple.

You're essentially dismissing with hindsight that there's anything interesting about past cultures that we don't know we don't know by saying that we're better off not having lots of (possibly trivial) details about them. Being happy about a lack of information goes against everything students of the past are about.