Netflix and Google Books Are Blurring the Line Between Past and Present

“The past is a foreign country,” novelist L. P. Hartley wrote. “They do things differ­ently there.” He penned that in 1953, but in the digital era the past is now present and all around us: Millions of out-of-print books and historical videoclips, black-and-white movies, nearly forgotten TV shows and pop songs are all available with a credit card or in many cases for free. It used to be that, for economic and techno­logical reasons, this cultural history was locked away. Libraries and corporate archives kept a small subset of it available, but the rest was in storage, out of reach. The reversal has happened in just the past decade. We are now living in a history glut; the Internet has muddled the line between past and present.

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