Recap: why we need to think
0: learning to share
BCM301 history 2.0
More plain thoughts on media and
communications history
(Kate Bowles)
In other words …
• A little history helps us understand the claims
we are making about the future
• Good media and communications history is
place-sensitive, culturally specific, and
often micro-historical
• This history replaces teleology (belief in the
inevitability of the upgrades we had to have)
with an appreciation of the multiple and
relatively disorganised causes of change: not
just technology and innovation, but random
and idiosyncratic changes to practice
History 1.0: anticipating the
move to participatory models
• Traditional histories driven by shared ideals of
historical authority are supported by systems of
access to conventional modes of print publication:
historians work in universities, and write books
• Traditional modes of publication have tended to
marginalise collectors and hobbyists, amateur
historians, local and volunteer historians, and family
historians; and there is also some professional
friction between archival and oral historians
• These disputes are politicised by different
understandings of the value of ordinary (non-heroic)
experience
History 1.
historically
“Surrounded as we are by future-oriented
debates about the impact of new
communications technologies, it may well be
that the first thing we need, if we are to avoid
the twin dangers of utopianism and
nostalgia—and to avoid the historically
egocentric error of treating the dilemmas of
our own age as if they were unique—is some
way of placing these futurological debates in
historical perspective.”
(David Morley, “Public issues and intimate histories”, 2003
Aims for today
• Thinking about the changes to conventional
historiographic practice (history 1.0) that
anticipate the transitions to we’re describing
as “history 2.0”
• The characteristics of history 2.0
– Participatory, collaborative and somewhat
egalitarian (the wisdom of crowds?)
– Open to dispute (and dispute in the open)
– Amenable to non-traditional forms of publication,
particularly dynamic visualisation
– Persistent, unregulated and inconclusive
History 1.0 and the rise of
popular memory
• The Popular Memory Group were part of the Centre
for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the early 1980s,
and have been a major influence on oral history, and
histories of ordinary life, since then
• They argued that research into everyday experiences
helped understand the present as much as the past
• Popular memory is a site of political struggle over
self-representation and identity
• Memory work challenges the methodological
assumptions
• Memory work is connected to narrative historiography
1 2
Narrative theories of history
• Narrative historians have noticed that history
is composed of stories, and that in its
structural “emplotment” (Hayden White)
history itself challenges the idea of a
straightforward relationship between the
historic account, and the historic event
• History is both the story we tell about the
past, and the interpretation of the story
• This has been controversial within history:
does it suggest a denial of things actually
happening?
History 2.0: forms and
standards
• The web is significantly changing the capacity
of marginalised or emerging popular
historiographers to share their collections or
publish their findings
• As a self-archiving technology the web is also
generating apparently un-interpreted
historical data, like twistori
• Forms of history 2.0:
– Personal collections as online museums
– Large data collections
– New kinds of visualisation
historical authority
“Remembering in a historical sense occurs not only
through the voices of history’s participants but
through the work of the collector of stories. …The
narrative thus becomes a joint creation of the
workers, the interviewer, the transcribers, and the
historian, creating what historian Michael Frisch calls
a ‘shared authority’ over the oral history text. In fact,
there is no single authority when writing history,
but this method of construction makes that all the
more obvious.”
Michael Keith Honey, Black Workers Remember, 1999
History 2.0: the risks
• When history opens up to the ideas of
storytelling and shared authority, we need to
be alert to difference of opinion and think
about what this means
• We need to develop different evaluative and
interpretive skills, to assess the credentials of
one historical account and another
• We need to look at carefully at the issue of
history as entertainment, particularly in
visualisations: what kind of apparent histories
are self-generating?