lovehistory.net

The fact that I am a cultural historian of the 20th century is beginning to make me feel a bit weird in comparing myself to my classmates, though I’m sure the gulf is nowhere near as great as it sometimes feels. Because I’m doing a combined masters/PhD, I don’t yet have a dissertation topic, so in more than one way I’m still trying to figure out the specifics of what I want to do. I do know that I feel incredibly compelled when I interact with mass media texts, particularly television, but my focus on 20th century history means I have an almost unbelievable scope of sources to choose from. Back as an undergrad, it was finding pictures of fallout shelters on the internet that hooked me into my chosen methodology and field of focus. It was picking apart images of radical feminists and reading television, film, and science fiction into my work that reinforced my decision. And it was the internet that facilitated my exploration – without it, my most important research project, a study of radical feminists, would never have happened. The internet seemed so integral a part of the process that at the time I didn’t even stop to think how it facilitated research that otherwise would have been impossible. I was lucky to have it so easily at my disposable.

I’m currently in the middle of a lecture sequence for my History 100 students, the first time I’ve ever had a chance to instruct, and I realized as I pondered the question above that researching and preparing my presentation took place almost exclusively online. The only exceptions were the books and articles I read in paper form, but, I still found all these resources online through databases and catalogs and searches on Amazon. My lectures focus on the domestic ideal in the 1950s, but really exploring the nuances of that decade from a cultural standpoint and demonstrating them to students would have been extremely difficult without new media. I’m showing them a bunch of clips from cartoons and t.v. shows, all of which I found on YouTube, and all of the advertising copy and other images and print material I’m using also came from online searches. Very few of them came from databases geared specifically to historians. In fact, many came from simple Google image searches (which may raise questions of credibility for some, but I didn’t find them too troubling when I evaluated my findings). The internet also put my in contact with past instructors who recommended relevant sources.

I even managed to work Beyonce into my lecture (which I am probably unhealthily proud of), and it was at that point in the slideshow that I could tell I’d won converts. These kids may not be “digitally born,” but they did grow up surrounded by new media, and have learned to speak its language to a certain degree. It was easier for them to hook into the new media components of my lectures, and connecting Beyonce to the ideal of a homemaker made what I was telling them immediately relevant to their current lives. It validated their experiences from a historical standpoint. I would have even found that image or thought of that approach without the happy accidents that often accompany Google keyword searches. By teaching them about subtext, I’m also instructing them on how to become more active participants in evaluating the new media they interact with every day.

To me new media seems to be an extension of what we already do. Digital history at this point seems most useful in making sources available to historians. It also provides useful tools. Showing this website to my students, which allows you to evaluate if you would survive an atomic attack, was another visual way for me to make all the graphic images I showed them of nuclear attacks seem relevant to their lives. And while scholars are still grappling with how to use the internet to disseminate analysis, it seems to me that sites like Wikipedia move in the right direction toward not only getting people excited about history, but creating a space for them to actually participate in what is in many cases a closed system.

So new media will change nothing, new media will change everything. New media is a tool for information sharing and information gathering. New media is a way to force the doors of the academy open, new media is a way to allow scholars to prove the academy’s usefulness. New media is a way to get a class full of college freshman to connect history to their everyday lives, new media puts historical sources in the hands of these same students, new media makes history real in a way that erases the disconnect between our audiences and the historical materials we deal with. New media allows a wider audience of people to see life in these distant, dusty things. New media, barring some apocalyptic meltdown, is most likely here to stay.