The pulse of our culture as Generation Y, otherwise known as the Millennials, has steadily come to a standstill in comparison to prior generations, with such characteristics as devotion to work ethic, deep-rooted values and civil unrest.

Thanks to the mass production of media devices and social networking sites, an excessive amount of documentation of happenings from vacations and graduations to political campaigns and public forums will mark our generation. Despite the misuse of products like consumer-level digital cameras for vain self-gratification, their use by civilians and media outlets will also serve as historical records far greater than the capacity of previous generations.

Historical inaccuracies plague our society. I recall a time that I believed Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492 and then made friends with the natives of the land, growing corn and living together in harmony, no rape and disease attached. Granted, kindergartners have a tendency to react poorly to the atrocities of humanity. However, with historical wars documented by the victors, how will we ever know the truth?

Take Judas, the traitor to Jesus Christ, as a prime example. In the modern day, the other disciples may have become wise when he accepted a “friend request” from Pontious Pilate and “tagged” an image of them drinking wine out of plastic cups. Following the crucifixion, Judas could have posted a “tweet” saying, “OMG I just killed my best friend.” If that were the case, he may not have the reputation for being so deceitful, potentially absolving him from his historical status as a backstabber.

Contemporary technology would have made the era of McCarthyism interesting. It may have meant a surge in tech-related employment, where all computers would have a set of specific key words related to communism and general dissent, which would be filtered to the government, resulting in much less leg work in the witch hunt, while still demanding number crunchers chained to cubicles.

Media outlets have the greatest responsibility to objectively portray the past so the future can learn from the present. The age-old quote about journalism is that “it’s the first rough draft of history.” If this is true, they must use every resource in their power to ensure that personal biases do not compromise the accuracy of their reporting. The unfortunate reality is that objectivity in journalism simply does not exist, and therefore our history will be littered in biases regardless of the pen-holders’ impartiality.

Although there will be a great deal of content marking milestones like the dot-com era, the rise of social networking and YouTube in the past two decades, channeling relevant media may be difficult. Perhaps we should criminalize irrelevant tweets and status updates, because eventually our second-long attention span will run out of the original 140 characters.

Maybe the future will be better than what appears to be ground zero. It’s not clear whether this period of reconstruction will be a success or that America will fall like the Roman Empire. If we do fall, at least we’ll have a decent scrapbook to look back on after watching the world burn.