New Media History Lessons...maybe?

I should be hesitant to start with a cliché, but I’ve never had much in the way of shame. History is written by the winners. It’s clear that the dominant media will always reflect the values and impressions of the winning group. That said, this idea is now cliché because it’s essentially become part of our cultural consciousness. We now know that we all know that the winners determine the “facts” of history. Which leaves us no room for any plausible deniability and I think the popularity of books like Lies My Teacher Told Me the Disinformation series simply emphasize this shared anxiety.

I’ll make my point now (and as briefly as possible). This shift in public ideas about the creation of history is not based in some ethical reasoning; the fear that we’re marginalizing in history some horribly oppressed and slaughtered peoples (at least not exclusively). It’s because we’ve become gluts for information, particularly about subjects we’re interested in and in which we style ourselves as experts or those subjects that our shared culture agrees that we should be familiar with. We live with the anxiety that some day we will say something we’ve taken to be for fact for our whole lives have someone else tell us we’re wrong and that they can prove it. The ease with which we can now access information means that most people now have the ability to become “self-styled” experts. Electronic media as a method of recording history has allowed people to become participants in this cultural exchange. Consider that for the average information finder Wikipedia is the first stop for random history needs and how much users are allowed to interact with that information. In our current media we’re no longer satisfied with one perspective and we often seek out that conflict of ideas as somehow being more “real” or at least more in line with our experiences.