Bcm301 Week 3 2009

Recap: why we need to think historically BCM301 history 2.0 More plain thoughts on media and communications history (Kate Bowles)

Narrative theories of history

“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.”

• 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?

(David Morley, “Public issues and intimate histories”, 2003

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 2.0: forms and standards

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

• 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:

– 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

– Personal collections as online museums – Large data collections – New kinds of visualisation

History 1.0: learning to share 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?

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

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