Essay - Why should history be any different?

Isn't the incorporation of technology a part of any professional field? Why should history be any different?

Glassberg attributes the increase of historical activity to people coming into contact with more historical experiences. Through the internet we are exposed to so many different stories about the past, even if we don't pay particular attention to all of them. People in the past encountered history in a much narrower way. This was typically through their environment. A war monument might be one. Or a a historical building in the town they lived. Perhaps it was what they saw at a museum in the city while on vacation. It could have been a roadside marker that they drove by that caught their attention. People may have also experienced history by living through it.

Yet people can access all of the ways to experience the history I listed above, without actually being physically present. No longer do you have to open a history book to feel and experience history. Just by browsing on youtube, you can experience history that has occurred thousands of miles away and dozens of years in the past. The news is full of articles that bring history related topics to attention. Historical games allow people to interact with history in ways they have never been able to do before. History is now more fluid than it has ever been in history.

I enjoyed reading Wallace's essay. Many of the topics that he theorized upon are not only reality now, but have moved much father than the scope he perhaps imagined when he wrote the article. He mentions that at the time of that articles writing, there were 14 million CD-ROM drives in use. Just think about that for a second. Not only does almost every single computer in use at this time have a CD-ROM drive, it is a multi drive that also play DVD and Blu-Ray discs.

Technology is increasing the spread of information at an unprecedented pace. The world is more connected now than it has ever been. Not only can we communicate to the other side of the world in seconds, we can travel there much faster than was ever possible before. As a business major, we focused extensively on globalization. It has a huge impact on potential markets that you can tap into. But as a history major, we largely skipped over this trend in history, mostly I think, because it has just become such a recent topic. The automobile as a symbol of  physical freedom has been replaced by intellectual freedom on the Internet.

Historians need to embrace technology. It does not replace the physical world, it serves to enhance our connection to it. The video we saw in class only reaffirms this position. You can connect to the physical world and learn more about it. For example, we were shown in class how goolge maps can be connected to tumblr images. We can see both the world as it stands currently and as it was in the past. I think historians today are only just now realizing some of the doors that technology can open.