Digital age history: June 29, 1998 issue of New Thinking

June 29, 1998 New Thinking:
Digital age history

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June 29, 1998

Digital age history

This week's New Thinking is brought to you by
Kevin Sweeney.

The modern world is becoming increasingly Americanized. Don't get me wrong, I love and admire American culture and I marvel at its creative power and brilliance. But it’s not good for the world -- America included -- if we all swap our local and national identities for a second-hand, homogenized American identity.

The greatest human creativity comes from an interface of cultures. No society proves this argument better than the global cultural melting pot of the United States of America. Our own history, local, national and global, is an important part of our diverse cultural identities.

We must preserve what is unique in our own cultures, not in a narrow xenophobic way, but in a way that views other cultures with respect and learns from them. No living culture can stop reinventing itself and growing, but it must have other cultural pools from which to drink.

The great Anglo-Irish literary revival came from the English-speaking Protestant community interfacing with the Irish-speaking Catholic community. We all need to remember our own histories, they are an essential part of the cultural pool from which we will go on reinventing ourselves.

But history can give more than identity. It gives perspective and a long view that allows seemingly transitory events to be understood as part of an evolving process. The modern mass media driven agenda demands instant reactions and answers.

In the early days of the Netscape/Microsoft battle of the browsers, Time magazine ran an article that featured a drawing of Bill Gates in General Patton mode, fighting (they suggested) for the soul of the Internet. We were asked to believe that this so-called war was an end game that would irrevocably determine the future of the Net.

I don't believe it will. If there is a war for the soul of the Net, then this battle may turn out to be no more than an early skirmish. If history teaches us anything it is that seemingly minor events can turn out to be the real harbingers of change. The modern world often focuses on that which glitters and is perceived to be sexy. In doing so we often miss the real story, which requires patient thought and observation to interpret.

As we prepare our schools for the emerging digital age, we tend to focus on hardware and software. However, perhaps the greatest preparation we could give our children is a love of history. History (when taught properly) is the only subject where children are exposed to a diverse range of seemingly contradictory information.

The key to good history teaching is giving students the skills to judge the value of competing information sources, to understand the different agendas that each source is promoting and from this sea of contradictions to extract what is useful and valid. This surely is one of the key digital age skills.

The Internet is a wonderful source of history. A myriad of personal websites tell the stories of local communities and of individual families. Many of these amateur websites leave the offerings of major corporate bodies in the shade. Perhaps the Internet can allow us all to tell our own stories, help us to preserve our own cultures, hear the stories of others and in so doing to make our own history.

Gerry McGovern

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History (when taught properly) is the only subject where children are exposed to a diverse range of seemingly contradictory information.