The World in a Blog- or Book- Part III

Please see the previous two entries for Parts I & II.

Perhaps one way to think about communications media and its attenuating psychological, temporal and geographical flexibility is how we manage our communication technology. Our blogs are quite flexible: we can continuously add new posts, delete previous posts, or change the overall design and categorization of posts. We have also discovered that organizational methods, like time-stamping blog entries and tagging articles for improved searching, helps us to create a system for tracking our writing and to aid us in our reading. Our systems are a means of preventing cognitive overload given the amount of textual and visual information we create or consume. They can also help publicize our work and interests to others. For example, we may choose to display where we live or work online so that those near or far can contact us for information or connect to our resources. These methods allow us to make sense of our shared reading and writing habits.

There are many more questions that emerge from examining my blog and the readings of this semester relating to historiography and methodology: firstly, how has the discipline of history and how have historical methods changed with technologies like blogs, the Internet, hypertext, and other documents and resources on the World Wide Web? What metaphors are we using to describe these phenomena (I mentioned two earlier, “global village” and “world.”) Are we becoming our own historians and archivists by documenting our lives with rapidly accumulating texts, images, and sounds? How do we study history when our primary documents are dynamic and interactive, as in the case of blogs and wikis? Do we read the “edits” page of Wikipedia entries as a document of history made transparent because we can see who corrected what entry and when? How do we consider the history of communication if our documents of study become increasingly disorderly, editable, and authorship is anonymous or questionable? How do we ascribe credibility to continuously changing texts? What is popular may be judged so based upon the opinions of an uninformed or uncritical mass, as we have learned from Jarod Lanier. Will we rely increasingly on algorithms, or on the online feedback of groups or individuals, to determine the importance of content? How do historians measure the importance of various events when so many experiences are documented and in so many ways? How does the scope of historical research change with hyperlinking, or when researching blogs that are not only singular entities, but connected to other blogs? How do we think about texts and sources that are dynamically populated with commentary, content and images authored by people all over the globe? In some ways some of these questions are distantly related to earlier problems of anonymity and authorship in ancient documents; however, what was previously rendered anonymous in the non-print world, may be rendered anonymous now on a much larger scale.

The two epithets at the beginning of this essay were selected because they linked now-clichéd metaphors relating books to physical worlds, and electronic books and texts to instantaneous accessibility to knowledge. Current communications technologies complicate how we examine knowledge and information because our objects of study are no longer easily bounded by physical spaces or timescales associated with printing press distribution or other forms of media that are less “instantaneous”. One word I have heard repeatedly throughout this semester in various classes is the word “multimodal.” What does this word mean in the context of the blog and print books? What does it mean to live in a world where communications technologies allow for expression in a multimodal way, with opportunities for us to access information and content in many different places and times? Although we can incorporate tracking programs into our blogs to understand how many people visit them and for how long, we cannot predict their social relevance, how they be recontextualized by others and by ourselves, or even how they will even look or sound in several years.

I have ended this essay with far more questions than answers for how we understand our relationship to history, time and place, reflecting the thought process of my past blog entries. These questions might serve as entryways for studying how we integrate technologies into our everyday lives, how we might teach or learn from them, and how we might make distinctions in their use and reception. It is a confusing and exciting time to be a historian, journalist, teacher, student, diarist, hobbyist, knowledge worker, pundit, self-described expert- whatever you want to call the individuals or groups of people who use and contribute to the discourses afforded by blogging or any other form of computer-mediated communciation. Will our blogs serve as historical documents and testimonies of our lives in the beginning of the twenty-first century, just as paper-bound journals, printed newspaper and written ephemera served to assist in the research of historians like Elizabeth Eisenstein or others we have read (or even to assist ourselves in research, as academics and educators)? Just as the Annales historians that Professor McClintock spoke of earlier this semester brought attention to the human life outside of the explicitly political sphere, so there are many opportunities today to study the microhistories of people as they document their lives and thoughts in websites, wikis and blogs.

Works Cited
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Eisenstein, Elizabeth. “Some Conjectures about the Impact of Printing on Western Society and Thought: A Preliminary Report.” The Journal of Modern History 40 (1) Mar. 1968: 1-56. JSTOR. Web. 11 Mar. 2009.
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