Digital Discord

I think it is ironic that all of our readings about the benefits and harms of digital history are accessible online. I wonder if the authors feel that the negative effects of digitalization won't apply to them? Or if they are compelled to embrace it because the technological forces are simply too strong to resist? It's likely just a simple matter of the good outweighing the bad.

Virginia Heffernan provides an interesting, general overview of these pro/con points in her NYT article, "Haunted Mouses." She laments that expanding accessibility to the internet is also promoting expanding accessibility to misleading information, gruesome images, and an entirely unhealthy thirst for information (regardless of its credibility). I think Heffernan is missing a crucial point-- there is a market for misinformation that has existed long before the internet. While the age of constant connectivity provides a new and tempting outlet for sensational media, we can still find tabloids at every supermarket checkout and elderly relatives relating memories that have been colored by time.

I have more appreciation for Nate Hill's criticism in "Hyperlinking Reality," in which he comments that the internet is not being used to its full potential to bring communities together. His bar code experiment attempts to counteract the isolating effect of technology by allowing members of communities to interact in a particular space, despite the differences in time, effectively creating a new kind of virtual community.

Speaking more directly at historians, Dan Cohen and Roy Rozenweig attempt to address the many questions about academic communication via the web in their online book, Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving and Presenting the Past on the Web. Cohen and RozenWeig are strong proponents of using the internet as a tool for historians and seek to advise the historical community on overcoming some of its inherent difficulties which they identify as: "quality, durability, readability, passivity, and inaccessibility." Despite these obstacles, the authors hail the internet as a new means for opening previously closed sources to a wider population and igniting a curiosity about history in the public. While I believe their book serves as an effective guide for setting up a historical website, promoting it, and perfecting it, I fail to see how they address the initial dilemmas they put forth in the introduction. For instance, they do not give any potential solutions to how the historical community can deem a site for the public credible, nor do they pragmatically address the class divide that makes the internet more available to one social class than another.

In "Wiki in the History Classroom," Kevin B. Sheets addresses one of the scariest popular sensations facing history teachers: Wikipedia. Instead of cautioning his students against Wikipedia, he used the popular "Wiki" website to allow his students to create their own page about a particular topic. Through their contributions, deletions, and edits, students learned Sheets' intended lesson: history is a conversation. And, though Sheets never mentions this, I believe that this type of lesson could also teach students to be critical of sources they find on the internet.

As I said in my very first blog post, I love the internet. I love that this week's readings cost me absolutely nothing on Amazon or the Temple Bookstore. Accessibility of information on the internet is one of the best advances to emerge from the 20th century and, hopefully, as we move forward, we will develop a societal intelligence about how and when to best use this information, both academically and personally.