I actually find it interesting to think, in 50 years, how the average person will view "history" visually.<p>Because for me, history was always linked to visual artifacts -- styles of painting, black and white, jerky films, then styles of film grain and saturation, and so on.<p>The kind of vivid, "real"-looking photography that comes with cell phones is a very recent thing that it's still all "recent memory" rather than "history".<p>How would I view events like WWI, or the Civil War, if we could watch them in 1080p? Would they feel "closer"? Will it have the effect of collapsing time? Would we "learn more" from history because we can identify more?<p>Or will the ubiquity of content make it irrelevant? Will it seem less like history and just more of an extended present that we bother to learn even <i>less</i> from because it just seems the same?<p>(Sure you could argue that we'll have 360° 30K video with megagamut, and that current photo/video will seem equally quaint, but I don't think that's true. Footage today seems qualitatively real in way that black and white from the 1940's wasn't. I believe there's a threshold of quality we passed that probably started first with digital camcorders, and finished with the advent of 1080p videocameras in cell phones.)