Just below the Japanese village of Aneyoshi, there’s a stone carved with a warning: “Remember the calamity of the great tsunamis. Do not build any homes below this point.”
Placed there after a tsunami devastated the area in 1933, it helped those who listened to it remain safe from a similar disaster in 2011, almost 80 years later.
When the last wave of the coronavirus recedes, what kind of guide stone will exist for future generations?
An unprecedented effort is underway to fill vast digital archives with information related to the pandemic. Researchers at the University of Arizona, for example, have started a project called A Journal of the Plague Year: An Archive of COVID-19 that invites the public to contribute everything from personal videos to Instagram posts and internet memes about life during the coronavirus.
But simply storing information in a repository isn’t enough; people will neither be able to access nor interpret it without the proper social and technological infrastructure.
For a reminder to be truly effective, huge swaths of the population must recognize the risk and be able to adequately prepare.
Motivating people to achieve this latter aim is the biggest challenge. We are biased in many ways toward our personal experience, and we tend to underestimate or dismiss risks unless we encounter them firsthand.
We tend to underestimate or dismiss risks unless we encounter them firsthand.
Challenges from this bias grow over time. All events eventually disappear from living memory – a process that takes about 90 years. Once this happens, later generations have fewer opportunities to have compelling conversations with eyewitnesses. These interactions are important motivators for taking the threat of recurrence seriously. The disappearance of vivid personal memories of polio, whooping cough and measles has plausibly contributed to the rise of anti-vaccination sentiment, in spite of the well-documented danger of these diseases.
Perhaps bias can be overcome to some extent through technology. Watching videos of life in quarantine or interviews of those impacted by the coronavirus is the closest that future generations can get to experiencing the pandemic firsthand or having conversations with those who did.
Counterintuitively, technology can interfere with this effort. Digital media makes spreading misinformation easier. And the emergence of deep fakes suggests that there will be unforeseeable ways that people in the future might doubt convincing evidence about the coronavirus.
There remains a more basic problem. By enabling us to better preserve and spread information, technology has overloaded us with it. Can we assume that the reminders left behind will automatically get the attention they deserve from people living in an information-saturated world?
In the long run, actively remembering the coronavirus cannot be everyone’s job; perhaps it’s best to depend on a relatively small number of people.
Existing institutions don’t look like they’re up to this task. Universities focus on creating new information and preparing students for the job market, not spreading old warnings. Libraries are great at storing information but not at interpreting and communicating it to the public.
Agencies such as the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization have the power to capture the public’s attention. Yet even they can become manipulated for other purposes.
Future generations deserve to be in the best position possible to deal with the next pandemic. This preparation includes reminders about what happened in 2020.
Sean Donahue is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at the University of Southern California. Distributed by The Associated Press.