There is a tendency to think that, in the light of recent media proliferation, those looking back a century from now will find it easy to work out how we all felt, what we were up to and how things worked. After all (the argument runs) they’ll have blogs, twitters, and a billion podcasts to go at – what more could they want?

It has been my experience that the existence of recorded media makes little or no difference to our ability to bring the past to life; in fact, it can render the process more difficult. We use the phrase ‘in living memory’, and it is the living part which is key: if one older person with shared syntax and cultural experiences relates to a younger colleague or family member what they saw and how they felt about it, there will be a form of understanding that is carried forward.

When this was the only way to learn and remember, older people were revered largely because they had the knowledge. Once writing and then the printing press allowed for mass ‘knowledge sharing’, the testimony of the old was doomed to end up where it is today: grumpy old manism. But there is not a book, tape, movie or podcast in existence that will be able to recreate the feel of real life a hundred years hence.

The BBC’s sound archives illustrate this every time I use them. The attitudes, the accents and the topics of interest seem completely alien: listening to recordings from 1935, one realises how silly and dishonest seeing that time from our contemporary perspective is.

Ah but (people insist) one could then go to the bloggers. Quite possibly Methuselah could, but nobody else would have the years to plough through 1.4 billion blogs….the vast majority of which have their own rather odd and usually obscenely expressed agenda anyway.

People may doubt this thesis, but remember that it’s a mere sixty-three years since the world discovered – via horrifyingly detailed recordings of the event – how the Nazis tried to eradicate a whole religious culture. Denial of this is now so widespread in the Islamic world, it must make many younger neutrals wonder as to the veracity of the Holocaust. And therein lies something else we can’t imagine: exactly how future media owners and manipulators will choose to reinvent, doctor or ‘intepret’ contemporary events which – many decades from now – do not fit their world view. The Soviets in 1917 had only the airbrush: digital technology will allow future mindbenders to work undetected.

I think that what we desperately need is a visually recorded archive of in-depth market research interviews with people of all classes, religions and ages. Conducted entirely by independent research consultancies working to an organisation free from political interference (like the Office of National Statistics), it would endure as an entirely accurate and scientifically chosen cross-section of grass-roots opinion. Better still, it would be an inviolate record of changing mores over time. Preferably, it would have an equally unbiased commentary on the events surrounding the interviews.

Of course, the interviewees would inevitably be influenced by the media set of the time: ever since chieftains wound up their troops to hate Romans or Normans, such has been inevitable. But the important thing here is human individuals speaking their mind without filters. Somebody once remarked that the past is a foreign country, but for me it is more a foreign currency: without knowing how it differs in value from one’s own, it will remain a coinage to be debased by manipulaters.