I don't know where you're going with the Shakespeare tangent, which was nothing more than a throwaway analogy I used three posts ago, and I don't know why you think the Wikipedia article contradicts anything I've said about him. I don't care about that, anyway. Your argument is: Facebook is pure noise. Mine is: it's 99 percent noise but there are potentially broad historical and anthropological conclusions to be drawn from the noise, or from whatever remains of the 1 percent. Fair? You say I haven't backed up my claim, but I'm not sure how I can. It's an opinion. I don't think it unreasonable that, as the reddit poster said, someone's great great grandkids might eventually trawl through their Facebook posts, or some of them, or maybe ones that contain the word "family" just as someone in the 1800s might have read grandma's diary. Only this way it's easier and more definitely possible. Additionally, I think it possible that historians in a few centuries might look back at any one of the meaningless social "movements" that sweep through Facebook (the equality thing, maybe) and draw conclusions about us as a people, or use their findings to corroborate other ideas. A lot of my friends post art and poetry on Facebook. None of them are very good, but odds are the next Poet Laureate of the United States is out there writing poetry on his wall. You say talent will out, but you commit a logical fallacy in doing so. The fact that throughout history much talent has survived in the form of Shakespeare or Van Gogh or Homer is not representative, because it fails to take into account how much great art or writing we've lost to time in the process (a lot). Ironic that you use Van Gogh as an example; since he considered his works worthless he didn't take care of them, and an unknown number were destroyed. -- In one aspect do I agree with you -- Facebook isn't the solution, it's one small facet of the much greater solution that is represented by the internet and technology in general. Internet archives, not just Facebook, will be what historians turn to gleefully in the year 2500. Facebook may even be a bad example, because as you say it has a much higher percentage of chaff than many other possible sources of information for future humans. However, it's what got me thinking about this, and it offers a more personal touch while being a large enough entity that there's some chance its archives will exist a long time from now.