ROLE OF MEDIA IN PRESENTING HISTORY

Scholars use “media” to mean two different things. One usage refers to the
material or technology used to communicate. In this usage, the media are paper, or
radio waves, or the spoken word; this reflects the usage of artists, engineers,
physicists, and architects, who were using the term “medium” to describe the
materials worked with long before anyone ever thought of media as a way of
talking about mass communication. In the history of communication scholarship,
the most famous users of the term in this sense are Innis, McLuhan, and others of
the so-called Canadian School.
The second more familiar usage refers to the organizations that produce
media of mass communication. In this usage, the media are broadcast stations and
the New York Times; this reflects the usage of advertising agencies, which began
to describe newspapers, magazines, and radio as media around 1920. Adopted by
social scientists in the 1930s, the word “media” suddenly acquired obviousness in
the wake of World War II – at this point it came to seem familiar, like it had
always been in use, whereas it and the parallel term “mass communication(s)” was
really quite novel.(1)
In technological histories, the media seem to continually drift as signifiers.
But when the term media was borrowed by social scientists from advertising
professionals in the 1930s, its meaning was pretty fixed. To advertising people, the
media were anything in which you might place an ad. When scholars began to use
it regularly after World War II its meaning was only a little more complex: it
referred to what used to be called “the press” plus the film industry, radio, and
television – what Malcolm Willey memorably called instruments of “mass
impression.”
By an accident of history, though, scholars turned to the term media just
when a new medium, television, was being introduced. Ironically, then, television
has been the archetypal medium for both people and scholars, and most of our
ways of thinking about media are bound up in the history of television, just as most
of our ways of thinking about “the press” are bound up in the history of the daily
newspaper. The printing press is the first tool of mass production. (2)
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1. Angharad N. Valdivia (.ed), A Companion to Media Studies, pp. 96-97.

2. Ibid., pp. 99-101.

An epoch in the practice of history is coming to a close. For hundreds of years

the printed word has been the dominant mode of communication for the historical

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profession, in the process shaping its basic assumptions and structures. Today, the
printed word is being superseded by a diversity of communication forms with the
greatest impetus coming from moving images. The relationship between moving
images and oral history, always reciprocal, holds particular promise amidst the
present revolution in communications.
The practice of history as we conceive of it today began with the transition
from orality to literacy, which led to written records and the earliest works we
recognize as history. The next great shift came with the advent of the printed word,
which transformed society and the practice of history. As the era dominated by the
printed word winds down, historians are faced with complicated questions about
the use of a variety of mixed and changing forms of communication, ranging from
simple audiotape to the promising complexities of videodiscs linked with
computers.
The technologies of moving images are changing at a bewildering pace. The
Journal of American History and the American Historical Review now print film
reviews and articles on the subject, while the major historical associations have
film committees, give awards to films, and even schedule sessions at their
conventions.(3)
The storage, interface with and conservation of electronic information affect
historical research, and the issues associated with this are even more complex for
‘born-digital’ information: that which does not materially or physically exist in
analogue form. This includes a huge range of materials: emails, online documents,
electronic information, CCTV images, office suite documents, websites, audio
files, blogs, and databases. There is a new and emerging sense of dynamic
textuality and technological literacy. Mainstream, older definitions of information
fragment, transform and develop into something new and complex; the
implications of born-digital materials for archives and for researchers are profound.
Archival structures arrange digital information differently from analogue, and the
multiple changes in the organising principles of these institutions and the way that
documents are arranged, preserved and accessed will of necessity alter methods of
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3. Dan Sipe, The Future of Oral History and Moving Images, pp. 379-380

research and scholarship. The impact of new technologies on education systems,

research, knowledge conservation and information archiving is profound. For

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example, in 2000, zero documents were downloaded from the National Archives
website; now the number is around 66m annually. Millions more were viewed and
used online.
Digitization of collections and born-digital materials shifts our
understanding of management, transmission, interaction, copyright; there are
multiple associated issues including compatibility, migration, security, life-cycle,
interoperability, authenticity and reliability, and obsolescence. New methods of
appraisal for electronic records are being developed, strategies for digital
continuity are being implemented, and new presentation systems are being
pioneered. Key projects include Electronic Records Online or the Digital
Continuity project at the UK National Archives and the September 11 Digital
Archive ‘at’ the Library of Congress.(4)
The web and associated database technology, then, presents new types of
investigation for the humanities scholar. The internet has profound implications not
simply for engaging with historical information as a scholar but also about how
historians might understand contemporary life. Those critics who have approached
this software have emphasised how scholars might use new tools for dissidence
and warned of idealising Web 2.0. Technologies change the relationship to
information, suggesting and creating new hierarchies, hegemonies and ways of
imagining society.
New technologies and media have affected the way that general or amateur
users interface with information. Gaming technologies have, for instance, the
potential to significantly alter the way that users learn and access information.
Search engine models such as Google Scholar have allowed users to, as the
advertising hook goes, ‘Stand on the Shoulders of Giants’.(5)
Google Earth (GE) is a database technology that uses satellite images to
present a dynamic, streaming photographic 3D map of the world. Users can
explore by inputting locations, global co-ordinates or areas; there is also the ability
to simply scroll around using a compass and a zoom function. As a service
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4. Gerome de Groot, Consuming History, pp.92-93.
5. Ibid,. pp.94-95.

technology it provides location finders, directions and images of key tourist

destinations. The consequences of the information found on Google Earth are clear

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– a seemingly real-time image of the world both enfranchises (giving access to the
globe) as well as imaginatively disciplining space in the way that all cartography
does. In terms of scholarship and communication, the potential for using the
images is widespread – the program can, for instance, allow for geospatial tags in
database or encyclopaedia entries, significantly shifting the way that information is
presented.
Google Earth has set of historical functions, in that various maps of the past
are programmed in to the basic software. Choose, say, a map of London in 1843 or
Asia in 1710 and the image of an historical map is overlain onto the contemporary
satellite image. This sense of the dynamic relationship between past and present
also establishes a very physical relationship between then and now.(6)
The design of most blogs, websites and search engines is complex and its
dependence on advertising clear. This fundamental commercialism is in conflict
with the ‘liberating’ model of the web. Information freedom is subsidised and
made possible through advertising, sponsor links and popups. Yet open source
coding allows at least partial ownership of the tools of production, and the
evolution and development of new methods of information retrieval and
presentation which circumvent the mainstream centres of economic power: ‘while
this (the internet) creates new opportunities for commercial exchange it also
enlarges the scope for infraction and transgression’.
Open source software and open content websites (designed to be copied and
reused), however, mean that knowledge and information become more flexible
entities; that epistemologies might be interrogated; and that the user becomes the
director of investigations. It points towards an open society, or a new means of
governance in the way that Habermas suggests, creating new ways of
communicating and understanding the modalities of the global economy; however,
it is only a tool. Open source emphasises the sharing and circulation of information
and ideas. It allows software to be, in effect, owned by the online community, with
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6. Ibid,. p.98.

utilities ranging from local history databases to the tracking and data-mining of
public financial information.(7)
In the past two decades, new media and new technologies have challenged
historians to rethink the ways that they research, write, present, and teach about the

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past. Almost every historian regards a computer as basic equipment; colleagues

view those who write their books and articles without the assistance of word
processing software as objects of curiosity. History teachers labor over their
PowerPoint slides as do sixth graders preparing for History Day. Email and instant
messaging has broadened circles of communication and debate among dispersed
historical practitioners, scholars as well as amateur enthusiasts.
In the past decade, historians with interests ranging from ancient
Mesopotamia to the post-Cold War world have enthusiastically embraced the web.
Virtually every scholarly journal duplicates its content online (though not always
openly), and almost every history course has its syllabus posted on the web.
Virtually every historical archive, historical museum, historical society, historic
house, and historic site—even the very smallest—have its own website.
The advantage of digital media for historians is storage capacity—digital
media can condense unparalleled amounts of data into small spaces. A 120-
gigabyte hard drive that sells for $95 and weighs about a pound can hold a
120,000-volume library. Because historians love data and archival sources, they
have great interest in this ability to condense large amounts of data into tiny
amounts of space. Historians who would like to make considerable quantities of
primary sources available over the web quickly learn that storage space is perhaps
the smallest expense they face.
The rapidly dropping price of data storage has led computer scientists like
Michael Lesk (a cyber-enthusiast to be sure) to claim that in the future, “there will
be enough disk space and tape storage in the world to store everything people
write, say, perform, or photograph.”
The vast storage capacity of digital media would be of much less interest
without a second and even more important advantage—accessibility. This quality
derives both from the ability to condense the bits and bytes encoded in digital
media into small spaces but even more from the emergence of ubiquitous computer
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7. Ibid., pp.99-100.

networks that can almost instantly send those bits around the world. Historians
have multiple audiences; digital networks mean that we can reach those audiences
—students, other scholars and teachers, the general public—much more easily and
cheaply than ever before. The distribution of history projects electronically

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approaches what the economists call “zero marginal cost;” once the initial
expenses are met, reaching an additional person costs almost nothing.
Online accessibility means, moreover, that the documentary record of the
past is open to people who rarely had enter before. The analog Library of Congress
has never welcomed high school students—its reading rooms, no less its special
collections, routinely turn them away. Now the library’s American Memory
website allows high school students to enter the virtual archive on the same terms
of access as the most senior historian or member of Congress. To those who
previously had no easy access, online archives open locked doors.
The accessibility and publicness of the web has consequences for history
projects much less extensive than those mounted by the Library of Congress or
major university libraries. High school teachers can devise community programs in
which students present the results of their historical research to an online audience
of local residents.
Historical societies based in small and declining towns on the Great Plains
can keep in touch with—and gather historical information from—former residents.
The Internet allows historians to speak to vastly more people in widely dispersed
places without really spending more money—an extraordinary development.
The past that is suddenly more accessible is also much richer because of a
third characteristic of digital media— what we might call flexibility. Because
digital media are expressed in a basic language of 1s and 0s, they can take multiple
forms, and that means we can arrange those bits into text, images, sounds, and
moving pictures.
Thus we can more easily preserve, study, and present the past in the multiple
media that expressed and recorded it. Online digital archives can contain images,
sounds, and moving pictures as well as text. And you can present the past in
multiple media that combine sounds, images, and moving pictures with words.
Flexibility transforms the experience of consuming history, but digital media—
because of their openness and diversity—also alters the conditions and
circumstances of producing history. The computer networks that have come
together in the World Wide Web are not only more open to a global audience of
history readers than any other previous medium; they are also more open to history
authors. The web, as a result, has given a much louder and more public voice to
amateur historians.
These first four qualities of digital media provide what we might call
quantitative advantages— we can do more, reach more people, store more data,
give readers more varied sources; we can get more historical materials into

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classrooms, give students more access to formerly cloistered documents, hear from
more perspectives.
Digital media also differ from many other older media in their interactivity.
This interactivity enables multiple forms of historical dialogue—among
professionals, between professionals and nonprofessionals, between teachers and
students, among students, among people reminiscing about the past— that were
possible before but which are not only simpler but potentially richer and more
intensive in the digital medium. Many history websites offer opportunities for
dialogue and feedback. The web becomes a place for new forms of collaboration,
new modes of debate, and new modes of collecting evidence about the past.
Digital media transform the traditional, one-way reader/writer, producer/consumer
relationship.
Finally, we note the hypertextuality, or nonlinearity, of digital media—the
ease of moving through narratives or data in undirected and multiple ways.
Hypertext, as is well known, is a constitutional principle of the World Wide Web;
its original designer, Tim Berners-Lee, called its most basic protocol the
“HyperText Transfer Protocol”— the “http” that begins every web address. In
hypertext, centrality, like beauty and relevance, resides in the eye of the beholder .
(8)

_________________________________________________________________
8. Daniel J Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Promises and Perils of Digital
History”. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting
the Past on the Web. Accessed on 2nd May 2013. Available from
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/ .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Groot, Gerome de, Consuming History, Routledge, Orion, 2009.

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2. Sipe, Dan, “The Future of Oral History and Moving Images”, in Robert
Parks and Alistair Thomson (.ed), The Oral History Reader, Routledge, New
York, 1998.
3. Valdivia, Angharad N, (.ed), A Companion to Media Studies, Blackwell
Publishing Ltd, USA, 2003.
4. Daniel J Cohen and Roy Rosenzweig, “Promises and Perils of Digital
History”. Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting
the Past on the Web. Accessed on 2nd May 2013. Available from
http://chnm.gmu.edu/digitalhistory/introduction/

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