Bcm301-09 Week 2

History is a matter of time BCM301 history 2.0 week 2 Plain thoughts about history 1.0 (Kate Bowles)

Time asserts itself in contemporary enquiry less as a given than as a range of problems, the solutions to which are constantly open to renegotiation. (Bender & Wellbery 1991, quoted in Thrift 1996)

History is … What happened before this

History is … What happened before this and

and How we describe what happened before this

How we describe what happened before this

Media and communications history: the innovation bias

Media and communications history: the location bias

• Media and communications histories focus on the keynote events of major innovation • This results in a teleo-technological account of what happens: innovation as a series of steps towards an inevitable and logical end • Most innovation is more random and less conspiratorial than this • This approach also tends to overlook interesting failures or local details

• Most media and communications history is the story of keynote innovations as they diffuse within the United States or Europe • Australian media historiography is put in an awkward position by this bias • Location bias within Australian historiography also favours metropolitan histories and doesn’t easily deal with questions of media that don’t arrive, or don’t perform

Media and communications history: the missing details

History is a matter of time and place

• The combination of innovation bias and location bias means that the timelines of media and communications histories tend not to explain the specific, local instances of media practice and media experience • What can we do about this?

Spatialising the story of modernity (both in revealing its operational spatialities and in opening it up to enable the presence of a multiplicity of trajectories) has had effects--it has not left the story the same (Doreen Massey 2005)

History is …

The bias of the archive

• History is the practice of historiography: writing the past • Historians practice selective attention to events commonly or at least credibly presented as significant • The credibility of traditional historic accounts depends in part on the accreditation of historical authority: who is authorised to write the past?

• Historians draw their credentials from their practice: use of primary sources in “the archive”, shared definitions of significance • Historical sources depend heavily on the collecting policies of libraries, official archives, museums and other collecting institutions • The bias of the archive is towards the keynote event and the official public record, not the everyday, the ephemeral or the trivial

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