No, no, no -- we got extraordinarily lucky that Shakespeare's works survived.

Many of his plays were published in editions of varying quality and accuracy during his lifetime. In 1623, John Heminges and Henry Condell, two friends and fellow actors of Shakespeare, published the First Folio, a collected edition of his dramatic works that included all but two of the plays now recognised as Shakespeare's. It was prefaced with a poem by Ben Jonson, in which Shakespeare is hailed, presciently, as "not of an age, but for all time." Shakespeare was a respected poet and playwright in his own day, but his reputation did not rise to its present heights until the 19th century. The Romantics, in particular, acclaimed Shakespeare's genius, and the Victorians worshipped Shakespeare with a reverence that George Bernard Shaw called "bardolatry". In the 20th century, his work was repeatedly adopted and rediscovered by new movements in scholarship and performance. His plays remain highly popular today and are constantly studied, performed, and reinterpreted in diverse cultural and political contexts throughout the world.

Let's back up for a minute and see where we've come from. The argument under discussion is that Facebook is gonna be great for future generations because it will preserve everything. My counter-argument is that it skews the discussion such that "everything" is a bunch of bullshit that nobody cares about now, so why should they care about it in the future?

In defense of your argument you have put forth the notion that "we got extraordinarily lucky that Shakespeare's works survived." This is not true. It's entirely probable that our record of shakespeare is better because of the folio that his friends published (they did not assemble it purely for love) but Shakespeare was popular then and he's popular now. It's a moot argument anyway - we're aware of Van Gogh, who was obscure during life, and Emily Dickinson, who was completely unknown. Quality will out - John Kennedy Toole killed himself in 1969 and his mom shopped his book around. A Confederacy of Dunces won a Pulitzer in 1981. It's not a miracle we have the Iliad; it's a testament to the strength of the story.

You've also put forth the notion that just because you share news articles on Facebook does not mean that everyone shares trivial bullshit on Facebook, but you have yet to cite evidence of truly interesting stuff that started on Facebook. The only things I can think of are Kony 2012 and random, useless picture changes in support of issues that Facebook has no leverage over.

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.

Which is not what I'm claiming, and is not something I would ever claim. I'm claiming that all they'll have from FACEBOOK is info-vomit. You have yet to counter this claim, but you have asserted again and again that Facebook is a repository of modern-day genius as if repetition will make it true.

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.

I'm not. I'm saying that if the ancient Romans had Facebook the statements they made there would not be particularly relevant to the historical record. Somehow you've conflated my statement of "Facebook is bullshit" with your desire for me to say "information is bad" and I suggest you rethink that.

Being happy about a lack of information goes against everything students of the past are about.

That's because historically speaking, information has been impossibly scarce. That is no longer the case:

"It is estimated that one weekday edition of today's New York Times contains more information than the average person in seventeenth-century England was likely to come across in an entire lifetime."

Consider the NSA: For going on ten years now they have had recordings of every foreign and domestic phone call made in the United States. All of them. Every single one. Somewhere in a data center in Texas resides every conversation the Tsarnievs ever had about the Boston bombings. Did it do them any good? Do you think they could even find them now if they wanted to?

We've gone from "a needle in a haystack" (Emily Dickinson) to a haystack in a haystack on Planet Haystack in the Haystack Confederation of the Haystack Galaxy. Presume the signal has stayed about the same - for a given population, the same percentage of people are Dickinsons, Shakespeares, and Homers. The noise has gone up exponentially.

Facebook is pure noise.

Look. The entire drive of this "the future will look back on my Facebook graph and see genius" is a narcissistic assurance to assuage the realization that the present sure doesn't give a fuck. And if the present doesn't give a fuck, why on earth would the future?

If you want to make history, make history NOW. Don't presume that the future is so bleak that our trivial bullshit suddenly becomes interesting through the long lens of time.