Oh, Playboy, How I Will Miss You!

Looking back over the semester it is amazing to think about what our group has been able to put together and what I personally have learned.  Just three and a half months ago, I was very apprehensive about having to create an exhibit using Omeka.  Technology is cordial to me at the best of times, and so having to put together something so massive was very intimidating.  I had never even blogged before this class, and just the prospect of writing the entries made me nervous.  Now having digitized so many items and placed them in my exhibit, I have become much more confident with my abilities involving technology.  I now know some technical jargon, like what a slug is, and can even use Photoshop.  Having these very basic skills now to build off of can only be a good thing as more and more aspects of life go digital.  As more historians and museums go digital, this project has had invaluable real world applications.  While I am not claiming to be a wizard with computers now by any stretch of the imagination, having created a digital exhibit using the Omeka software will only help in my search for a job.

The road to creating our online exhibit has not been a smooth one by any means.  When we first sat down and began looking at the Playboy magazines that were available in the Special Collections at the J. Murrey Atkins Library, we noticed that the magazine is so much more than just Bunnies and the centerfold.  There were interviews with famous actors and musicians, activists, and scientists.  There were essays on social issues and federal legislation.  There were book and movie reviews.  There was, of course, Hugh Hefner’s editorial, the Playboy Philosophy, which outlined his feelings on how society should look at certain issues, especially sex.  We decided that we wanted to share how Playboy portrayed and even played a part in the tumultuous 1960s and 1970s in America.  Jay Requard would focus on the hippie counterculture, Jessica Injejikian’s focus was to be the Sexual Revolution and Women’s Liberation Movement, and I would research the continuing African-American Civil Rights Movement, all between 1965-1975.  We hit a snag with expressing our original project idea and so the project took a bit of a detour for a while, having all of the focus on the sexual revolution and the portrayal of the sexes in Playboy.  Eventually we were able to get it together and express our idea in a way that made sense, and so the original project was back on.

            

Creating and sticking to our contract has been one of the struggles in our group.  We really had seemed to underestimate the amount of time that all the different parts of the project would take, and were a bit overwhelmed once we actually got into the magazines.  It turned out that we really needed to flip through every single page of every single issue so that we would not miss anything, something that had not been anticipated.  Though we really tried to stick to the schedule laid out in our contract, a couple of the deadlines turned out to be completely unrealistic.  Life got in the way and the enormity of the project was fully realized and, in the end, we kept in contact via email and met frequently in person whenever any of us had a breakthrough or silly question, always letting each other know where we were in the project.

            

Looking through every single page of the magazines was not a true hardship, though.  At almost 200 pages each, the magazines were filled with so many fascinating things.  It was interesting to notice that suddenly the cigarette advertisements carried a Surgeon General’s warning that they cause cancer or see the fashion change as the 1960s became the 1970s.  A fascinating section was the questions readers would send in looking to Playboy for help in their sex lives or just for a good drink recipe.  The layout itself eventually became familiar enough that it was easy to know exactly what you were going to be looking at in certain points of the magazine.  There is always a page of Playboy’s party jokes on the backside of each centerfold with a cartoon opposite, for example.  Just to compare, Jessica and I bought the September 2012 issue of Playboy only to find that this layout had not changed.  Even the layout of the interview page remained the same fifty years later.  Going through all of this made it so hard to narrow down the items to be included in the site.  I had at one point easily fifty possible items and it was difficult to cut the number down because I wanted to share all of the amazing things that I could not believe were published in Playboy magazine.

            

Our project also evolved as we did more research on Hugh Hefner and his magazine.  My exhibit on the African-American struggle for equality during this era has undergone many changes from what I had first envisioned.  I chose this topic after seeing that Martin Luther King, Jr. had been interviewed in January 1965.  I had also found some articles related to civil rights in the essays written for the magazine.  This exhibit did not make it very far as I remembered that the legislative portion of the Civil Rights Movement really ended in 1965 with the Voting Rights Act.  I simply changed gears and focused instead on the ideology of Black Power, which came to national prominence with the Black Panther Party in 1966.  Connecting this to Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Philosophy has worked out, and is now the main focus of my exhibit.

            

Although this semester has taken more twists and turns than we may have liked, in the end the exhibit we have put together tells a story that not many know about Playboy.  I am excited to show that Playboy could be read for the articles; it really is not all just Bunnies and playmates.

Writing a Web Filled With Lies (Not Really)

Before reading on how others feel writing on the web should be tackled, I wanted to see how my writing in this blog has been so far.  Taking my previous blog post, Mining for Data, and putting it in the WritersDiet Test, I found out that I have not been doing that well in my writing.  My overall score was flabby!  I thought I had been doing pretty well in writing this blog and had been feeling a lot more confident in it than I had at the beginning, but the words it, this, that and there are my undoing.  I didn't realize what the test calls "waste words" constituted such a huge part of my writing.  I had just been casually writing, trying not to be too academic without sounding like a pre-teen on Facebook.

I read the article Test your copy's readability , one of the articles from the Yahoo! Style Guide section on writing for the web.  Here it said that because most people will scan quickly first to see if a more in depth reading is necessary, it is best to aim for a Flesch Reading Ease score above 60 out of 100 and for a Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level between U.S. sixth and eighth grades.  There were directions on how to see what the scores would be using Microsoft Word 2007.  I took the same blog entry as before to see what my scores would be on these scales.  Again, my results were not so good.  I only got 53.9/100 in reading ease and my grade level is 12.5, way above a middle school level.

So now I wonder, how can I fix this?  One of the articles that I read was on sentence structure.  Here I discovered that I am being too wordy with my sentences.  On the web, short and simple is better.  I have been using too many conjunctions, making my sentences much longer than they need to be.  I also need to try to stick to the  subject verb object sentence structure to simplify even more.

The other area that I am struggling is in creating a voice.  The other article I read dealt with this issue.  I had thought that I was just being casual while still making my point in writing this blog.  Now I'm not so sure.  According to this, my paragraphs can sometimes be too long.  As you can see in this post, I have tried to fix this by only making one or two points per paragraph.  It really does break up the page nicely and is a lot less intimidating than a big wall of text.  In addition, I think I need to make sure that if I choose to either be joking or authoritative, that one style needs to flow through the entire post.

Writing for the web is such a different experience than writing for print.  I thought I was being causal on here, easy to follow.  I guess the writing that I have to do for other graduate level class has been seeping into this blog.  I will definitely be reading more of the article on the writing guide than I mentioned here.  Now I am even more nervous about writing the descriptions and part of the simple pages for my group's online exhibit.  I just want to make sure that my writing won't reflect badly on the rest of my group.  Time to get to work!

Mining for Data

I have to admit- this week's reading had me out of my depth and I found myself googling (ironically) some of the terms in the articles on data mining.  What I took from the readings was that data mining is finding the key words and phrases in the context of documents so that search engines will be able to get us the best results possible.  The article Googling the Victorians by Patrick Leary really helped to put it in context when he pointed out that this is the type of thing that historians do on a daily basis with the books and articles that we read.  Historians don't read every single word of other people's scholarship, but instead skim for key ideas and the evidence to support them.  Search engines seem to do the same thing, just on a much larger scale with millions of sites at the same time.

Leary also brings up another argument that people are still making seven years later: the internet versus the library or the archive- which is better?  Only yesterday I was on a database of African-American newspapers from the 20th century and was looking up articles spanning a decade from several different publications that I would never have been able to accomplish using the original print media in the short time that it took me online.  Leary seems to be of the opinion that many have adopted today  the internet and the digital age is clearly here to stay, so we might as well embrace and make the most of it.  However, there is one thing that I have not been able to duplicate in an online search that a physical library gives me instantly: related works.  In a library, I can look up a book on, for example, Alice Paul, and when I go to that section I can find multiple other books about her and the feminist movement that would be extremely useful.  The only thing that I have found close to this online (and if anyone out there knows something different, please let me know) are the recommendations that Amazon gives you at the bottom of a product page.  Instead, while searching online, multiple ways of searching the same thing have to be typed in to the search engine to ensure that an accurate representation of sources comes up.

This speaks to what the other two articles were about.  In his 2006 blog post, Searching for History, William J. Turkel talked about the release of data from search results made by about 500,000 AOL users.  My first thought was that the fact that the release was from the users of AOL showed the age of the article right off the bat.  However, it was really informative in the way that different people are searching for historical subjects.  Looking at this data today even can show how to set up your site so that a search engine will grab it over other, similar sites.  For example, Turkel states that most people search "American history" or "U.S. history" rather than "history of the United States."

The final article, From Babel to Knowledge: Data Mining Large Digital Collections by Daniel J. Cohen, talked about the benefits of using a specialized search engine, rather than just relying on something like Google, to get more accurate results.  He spoke of a program he created called H-bot to use for quick history facts.  My only problem with this was, it is six years later and this was the first time that I am hearing of this program.  Now, maybe I m not as connected to things as I should be and just missed this site, but to my knowledge people just use Google to look for their quick facts.  I do know that specialized search engines can be extremely beneficial, however.  I personally have used Google Scholar to find articles or journals for papers and found things that I would not have been able to just by using a regular Google search.  By paring the results down to only peer reviewed scholarly sources, it is much more efficient.  This being said, I understand the premise of H-bot, and it is a really good idea, but how can it compete with a giant like Google when the results are the same?

This article also spoke of the importance of non-profit archives having and running their own search engines, a premise that seems way out of the reach of many not-for-profit organizations.  This could have been a change since the article war written, but now many sites are using Google to search within themselves.  Many search bars have the little Powered by Google sign posted underneath them with the option of searching just within the site or on the entire web.  I'm not sure if this is the way to go about things, but the comfort of a familiar search engine like Google running these pages makes it much easier to browse through the results.

twitter role play

Teaching with Twitter: how the social network can contribute to learning  was written by Rosie Miles, a senior lecturer in English at the University of Wolverhampton in the United Kingdom.  I read over a few different articles on how twitter can be used in education, but this one stuck with me.  Miles spoke of how she used a system similar to twitter to have her students delve deeper into the material they were assigned to read.  She had her students become a character from the novel and argue online with each other in this way.  It made me wonder, how can this be translated to history and actually be used on twitter?

The twitter problem seems self explanatory- protect the tweets.  The system Miles used was like twitter (limited to 140 characters and even using #hashtags) but it was not accessible to people outside of the classroom.  Miles felt that this would give students more of a sense of security to be more open.  However, just protecting your profile on twitter would solve this problem.  Then you could use the site but people would need to be approved before the tweets could be seen.

I think that using twitter as a sort of role playing scenario could be beneficial for understanding the impact of primary source documents on the people during the time they were written.  For example, if in an American history class that is studying the Revolutionary War, it could be interesting to see the effect of the Declaration of Independence.  Some students could be select founding fathers or the King, some could be loyalists or patriots, Northerners or Southerners.  In this way, rather than just reading about the obvious ways this document changed the lives of the colonists, students would have to understand how it would effect different groups and say why they are for or against it.

Obviously this doesn't need to be done in an online setting.  Similar things can, and have, been done in person in the classroom.  One of my favorite classes as an undergrad was studying Early Modern England, and we actually split up into the different factions involved in the Civil Wars of the mid-1600s and fought it out in class (with words, sadly. Though I was in the "war" faction and we all made swords to intimidate the "peace" and "royal" groups).  Miles stated, and I tend to agree, that sometimes dramatizing things like this in class can get silly and embarrassing.  My Early Modern British history class was an upper level and so we all got pretty involved as we were all declared history majors.  However, I had the same professor for a lower level European history class and sometimes when we tried to do similar things there,  certain students who weren't in the history program wouldn't get involved because they were a science or business major (I have to admit I am guilty of the opposite: I was very against certain science activities when I had to take those classes).  Not having to let peers see how excited you get in person can go a long way in letting certain students get out of their shell, and the internet can provide that screen.

Perspectives: May 2007

In an article from the History and Technology column of the May 2007 Perspectives from the American Historical Association, The Digital History Reader: Teaching Resources for United States and European History by E. Thomas Ewing and Robert P. Stephens, a digital history reader was highlighted that was released by Virginia Tech.  The article itself is simply an overview of the site along with some student feedback in case you need some convincing that it works.  Looking at the site myself, it is really cool.  It takes the classic primary source reader and improves it ten times over.  There are of course letters, newspaper articles, and political cartoons, but the online format allows the expansion of content.  In this reader there are also links for sound bites and movie clips and, because the reader only covers the 19th and 20th centuries, they were able to add quite a few of these.  In addition, there is also a multiple choice quiz at the end with the option to email the results to your professor.  Now there are many undergrad texts that come with online components, but these usually come with a code in the book that you obviously have to pay for.  This is free for anyone to use, which is great because it could even be used in high school courses.  The only downside seems to be that since this article was written in 2007, not much appears to have been done with the site.  While there are several modules on different points in US and European history, there are many subjects that aren't covered that really could be.  For example, the last module on US history is on Richard Nixon.  There are a couple more decades after that in the 20th century that could have been covered.  Maybe funding was an issue, but these five years could have expanded this site into something even cooler.



A different article from the Viewpoints column was The Historical Profession 
and Archival Education by Joseph M. Turrini.  I really enjoyed this article because it made me think that there has been a rivalry between archival programs- one which history is losing.  I can say that my experience looking for a graduate program in public history  I did notice that there was a lack of archival studies offered  and often it would just be one semester class on the subject.  However, I didn't think anything of it because of the offerings that library science programs make on the subject.  The Southeast Archives Education Collaborative spearheaded by Auburn University came up with a really interesting solution to try and keep history archival programs in the game.  They teamed up with five other universities (Louisiana State University, School of Information and Library Science; Auburn University, History Department; University of Kentucky, School of Information and Library Science; Indiana University, School of Library and Information Science; and Middle Tennessee State University, Public History Program) to offer a greater variety of classes to their students.  Through this new collaboration, students are now allowed to take one webcam class at another university per semester.  This is an awesome use of technology and is right in step with the historians basic function of sharing knowledge.  I just wish that there were more schools that were able to do this in other programs.  It would be a really cool way to completely personalize your education and take advantage of online learning while at the same time having a classroom experience.  It would also allow students to see how different parts of the country think about different issues in the field.

Oh, Wikipedia!

I have to admit- I am guilty of using Wikipedia whenever I just want to make a quick reference to something, but I would never use it in my academic work.  The argument made for Wikipedia in the Middlebury College forum confirmed for me that this is the right thing to do.  While I was watching it, however, they did convince me of one thing: that Wikipedia could be a good place to start, and that it could be a great place to find sources.  It seems to make sense that when there are sources cited on Wikipedia, that they would be worth checking out.  Worse case scenario is that they would be unusable, but you could gain a valuable source that could be used for a paper.

But then I actually looked on Wikipedia on several different historical people and events.  As previously mentioned, I have only used Wikipedia for a quick reference in the past.  I have never really sat down and read an entire Wikipedia entry before, and looking at the history of these sites I am glad that I never really have.  The vandalism that is heard about on the site is a lot more prevalent that I had ever thought.  At one point, King Charles I of England had a 50 year period where he didn't call Parliament instead of the 11 that actually happened (not to mention the fact that he didn't even rule for 50 years before he was beheaded).


My favorite correction had to be in the article on women's suffragist Alice Paul, where the article said that not only did she help with the passing of the 19th Amendment, but her actions also helped with the raping of midgets.  Obviously, this was untrue and it is offensive to say about a woman who, in my opinion, was an amazing figure in U.S. history.  It's worrying that things like this are being posted and staying on this site for who knows how long before the volunteers who look for things like this take them down.  But before they get taken down, who knows how many people have seen and believed things that aren't true?

The discussion forums were not much better.  Here it was pointed out that in the Cleopatra VII article, some of her biography was taken form the HBO series Rome instead of historical sources.  There was also a very lengthy section debating on whether Cleopatra and her family was fully Greek or whether she was part African based on some claimed anthropological evidence and skulls.  The problem I have with this is that Cleopatra's final resting place is no longer known so how could a skull be used as evidence (not to mention may other things wrong with this thinking)?

After actually looking at what the people that are changing these articles are saying about these topics, I'm not sure that I will be going back to Wikipedia anytime soon.

The Playboy Contract

Creating our group contract has been a trying process.  Between one of our group members suddenly having to drop out of the program and another falling ill, it really fell on mine and the final member’s shoulders to finalize our idea and come up with our contract and schedule.  After meeting with Dr. Cox (who really helped us narrow our focus and gave us a lot to think about), Jessica and I were left to make it work.  Because it was only the two of us, some things were a bit of a challenge to figure out, like the full division of tasks and the final schedule.  We did the best we could to logically divide the workload and make a schedule that the three of us will need to follow.  In the end I think that we did a pretty good job coming up with a final direction to take our exhibit and giving ourselves a timeline with a little wiggle room for unexpected snags.

Now that we have an official focus and aren’t confused about things, I am getting really excited to start this project.  We are going to be looking at how Playboy presented sexuality for both men and women in the mid 1960's to late 1970's.  I personally will be focusing on how minority groups were represented within the magazine at the time.  I am eager to see how the civil rights movement changed the magazine.  The thing that I am most looking forward to, however, is actually getting to put the site together.  While not techo savvy, I love organizing things like this.  I think that it is going to be an excellent learning experience; one that I hope will make me a bit more trusting of and confident with computers.

The thing that worries me the most looking at the project ahead is trying to choose the actual pieces that are going to go in our exhibit.  We have a run of Playboy that, with the exception of 1971 and 1972 and a few missing issues in the late ‘70s, covers the years 1965-1977.  That is well over 100 magazines that need to be gone through, looking for the 10 articles, cartoons, ads, or covers that we each want to put up.  Just glancing through the magazines, there were already so many things that we want to include pertaining to sexuality (given that it is Playboy Magazine after all).  It is going to be a bit of a challenge, not only finding those 10 perfect things that represent each of our individual topics, but then also making sure that those objects mesh together as well, making a cohesive exhibition.

The September 11 Digital Archive

Before I even went on the site, I knew that the September 11 Digital Archive would be a very moving experience.  The events that happened on this day were some of the most horrific things that most of us will witness in our lifetimes.  That being said I think this site did a good job of capturing this fact: that the events of this day are now a part of all of us.  Not only were stories accepted from these that were directly affected by this tragedy, but also anyone with a story to share could submit.  There were many from all over the country that had shared their story, reinforcing the together feeling that all Americans had in the weeks immediately following the attack.

This site was easy to navigate through with the quick links of simply Browse, Repository (which had everything broken up into specific categories like "Satan in the Smoke" Emails), and Special Collections.  The subcategories within each were also clearly laid out, and so it was very easy to find either a story or a picture or a video within Browse, or see how Chinatown was affected within Special Collections.

What I most liked was that there was an FAQ page with quick facts about 9/11 as well as things before and after the attacks.  There is also a links page with a comprehensive list of other sites dedicated to September 11, 2011.  Usually it isn’t a good idea to take people away from your site, but I think that in this instance it works.  This site is all about capturing the events of the day, not really a memorial to those that had been killed, but if that was what you were looking for it was listed on the links page.

All of this, in my eyes, definitely fulfills the website's purpose, which is to "collect, preserve, and present the history of September 11, 2001 and its aftermath."

We All Love a Good Timeline

I am even more excited to finally get to work on my online exhibition now that I have found what will probably be a very useful plug-in.  I went to the plug-in page of the Omeka website and at first was a bit overwhelmed.  I had no idea what some of them were actually meant to do (I am not a techno savvy person), and even after looking at a larger description of some of them I am still confused.  When I saw the timeline plug-in, however, I knew immediately that this would be helpful in our project.

We will be working with Playboy Magazine covers and, while interesting, I know that if we were to just throw the covers online it would not be a very classy or educational exhibition (and would not fulfill the requirements of the assignment at all).  This is why I feel the timeline will be so useful.  With it we could make a timeline of the major events happening in the United States at the time the covers in our exhibition were released.  In this way, it may be easier for visitors to relate the covers to a certain period in American history.

Women and Pepys

After looking through much of Cliopatria's Blog Roll to find a couple of history blogs to follow, I finally found two that are interesting.

The first is Women of History.  I looked at several other blogs that had to do with women's history, but to me this one is the best.  Here there are short blogs about famous women through history and throughout the world.  The entries aren’t too long, just a couple of paragraphs, and the original source of the content if always given.  There is even a section of the blog where you can find different women based on the period that most interests you, like Ancient Egypt or the Crusades.  The short style of blogging is enough to give you a feel for the woman but isn’t overwhelming.  In this way, it is easy to see if the woman is interesting enough to warrant further research or if that is all you want to know about her.

The other blog isn’t a blog in a traditional sense.  From 2003 through the end of 2012, the administrators are posting one entry a day from the diary of Samuel Pepys.  Pepys’ diary covered some of the biggest events in Early Modern British history like the Restoration and coronation of Charles II in 1660 and the Great Fire of London in 1666.  The first of January 1660 was posted on the first of January 2003.  I’m really disappointed that the entries are almost over, but the past entries can be found in an archive, or if that much reading doesn’t seem exciting there are catch ups that can be read covering a year in the diary.  There is also a short biography of Pepys’ life before the start of the diary, and each entry is accompanied by links to interesting things that also happened on that day in Britain.  I will definitely be reading this blog from the beginning.

Website Time Machine

This week was no different from any other in my life as a history student: for class we had to look into the past.  What was cool though was that we needed to look at the evolution of a website over time using the very fun Wayback Machine through the Internet Archive.  This is a really fun site to mess around on and see how what I have become used to looked like even just 5 years ago.  For instance, I learned that the school where I did my undergraduate work had done a total overhaul of their site just a few months before I enrolled.  Also Target’s URL, target.com, was originally owned by a completely different company called Applix Inc. for a year before the giant corporation that is Target stores was able to get a hold of it.

After messing around for a bit I got down to what I was actually supposed to be doing and looked at a site that was historical in its content: the Milwaukee Public Museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  Growing up near Milwaukee, I had taken several class fieldtrips there when I was younger and thought it would be interesting to see how it has changed over the years, and it has definitely changed over the last 15 years.

The Wayback Machine’s first snapshot of the site was taken February 26, 1997 (probably close to the first time that I would have taken a field trip there), and it has all of the characteristics of the first websites.  It is almost all one bright color (along with black and white), a font that is easy to read in print but a little difficult on screen, and very simplistic.  Though looking at it, it is nice that there are not huge blocks of text on the screen.  It is just a list of links that will take you further into the site and hopefully where you want to go.

In December 2002 the site had vastly improved.  Now instead of just links on the front page, there were some highlights of current and future exhibits and programs with pictures to go along with them.  The links were still there, but they had been moved to the now familiar position of the left-hand sidebar of the screen.  These links were a bit confusing, however.  For example, there were Visit Us, Events & Programs, School Programs, Travel Programs, andExhibits links that could be a little confusing.  If I want to visit to see the temporary holiday exhibit on display, which link would I choose?  This style must have worked for them though because they stuck with it for several years.

Today the website has been overhauled yet again.  Now instead of a bright color or being mostly black, it is nice neutral beige that is less straining on my eyes.   It has also become a bit bigger in font size which has also helped.  Those links are still on the left side of the page, but they have been consolidated quite a bit.  There is also not only one way to get somewhere.  If I want to buy my admission I can click on the Buy Tickets link or through Visitor Info there is also a link titled Tickets. The main events and exhibits are still highlighted on the from page, though now there are more of them with a nicely changing picture above them to catch your attention.  All in all, this site has drastically improved, however there are still things that I find uncomfortable as a user.  For example the links forOnline Media, Press Room, and About Us seem as if they could all be under the same title of just generically About Us.  Plus, although their links have been cut way down and simplified, there are still a lot of them which means a lot of choices that I have to think through, not something I want to do.

I suppose that the thing to remember is that for a not-for-profit museum this is a pretty sophisticated site, and in only 15 years it has changed drastically.  For being so young, web design has improved leaps and bounds to make our experience as pleasant and easy as possible.  In another 15 years who knows where we could be.

What is Digital History?

 The most obvious answer to me would be that digital history is using the new technologies that are expanding every day in a way that helps to share history.  At least that was what I thought before I did my reading.  It turns out that there is much more to digital history than just using technology to further history as we know it.  The problem for digital history isn’t just getting the history out on the web, but the amount and quality of the history that is already out there.

Having been a college student for the past few years, I guess I have taken for granted the databases like JSTOR and ProQuest that were available to me through my library’s website.  Through these I could search to my heart’s content to find that one scholarly article I would need to prove my thesis for my research papers.  What I didn’t realize, or I guess really think about, was that these databases don’t come cheap.  There are hefty fees that libraries have to pay to allow their patrons access to these wonderful scholarly articles.  Also, the general public definitely does not have access to these resources.  I usually have to enter my school username and password at least twice before I can even gain access to the papers I need (which makes me wonder why I didn’t think about being able to access these things when I am no longer a student).

In another article on TechNewsDaily brought up a point of history in our time that I had never even considered.  Almost everyone in my generation has an online presence.  We have Facebook, Twitter, and (though we cringe at it now) MySpace pages to record our lives for our friends and ourselves.  At least that was what I had always thought I had been doing.  It turns out that, without even realizing, we are creating an almost second by second memoir of the daily life of the average person in the early 21^st century.  Historians of the future won’t be struggling to find proof to back up their theories about us, they will have too much to go through.

But then again, they may never have access to it at all.  Twitter saves every single tweet. In effect, Twitter has created a timeline of sorts that stores our reactions to world events.  The problem is that Twitter owns all of them.  It is hard for some families of deceased loved ones to gain the passwords to Facebook or email accounts, let alone some unrelated historian of the future.  With our lives so readily available for all to easily read online, could it be that the future will know very little because of companies protecting “our privacy” long after we are gone?  Sadly, we won’t know the answer to this question, but here is to hoping that we all will a historian our Facebook password so that he or she can include our life in their future work.

My sources:

Digital History by Daniel J. Cohen & Roy Rosenzweig, Introduction and Chapter 1

Digital Age Presents New Problems for Historians by Stuart Fox, TechNewsDaily

http://www.technewsdaily.com/775-information-overload-digital-age-presents-new-problems-for-historians.html