Old Weird Ward
Unless otherwise noted, that which is posted here is opinion, which is protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. If you don't like my opinions, go somewhere else. Nobody is forcing you to actually read this drivel.
The presumption exists that you can read at all.
That may be a large assumption.
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Monday, February 28, 2005
- - - - - Diarists and History - - - - -
I had a fairly profound thought the other evening.
Somehow or other, the words "Samuel Johnson" floated into my alleged mind. While Johnson was not a diarist, his observations on English life are often quoted, most notably that sailing on a ship was like "being in prison, with the possibility of being drowned."
Anyway, the main thought was that what we, in this time, know of that time is through newspaper accounts (filtered through reporters and editors), and accounts put down on paper in diaries (unfiltered), by the people who were actually present. In that era, that was a fairly small sample of the population, almost all educated people, with a particular viewpoint.
The same is true for America in the 18th and 19th century - especially in the case of those who made the great trek across North America to the West.
In the 20th century, there's not much of diaries, but a whole lot of newspaper articles (filtered by reporters and editors), photographs (newspaper/magazine, and amateur), and motion pictures/newsreels, and later, TV news and documentaries, all filtered.
But now, there's been what I think of as a seismic shift.
Not all bloggers are politicized. Many just write and post about everyday living, in many cases, with digital photos for illustration.
These "everyday" bloggers will have an impact on future perceptions of what we're living through now that has never been seen before. Not hundreds of diarists, not thousands, but hundreds of thousands of observers of every day life, with photographs of the people involved and their activites.
Historians of the future will not have a limited number of sources, with limited viewpoints, but will instead have enormous quantities of raw, unfiltered data to work with.
For historians, the implications are obvious, and staggering. It will no longer be a question of physically finding the data, the question will be how do the historians work through the raw, unfiltered data?
And...what conclusions will they draw?
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