This blog is for students of Macquarie Uni's Modern Honours unit Media and Methods. In the course, we bring history and media students together to introduce history students to the media, and media students to history. The course has run for two years and 2008 will be its first blogging year.
Frankly, this is an experiment - will it extend the work we do in class or become a substitute for it? Will we post lots of links to fantastic websites or will it just become another way to procrastinate? One reason for blogging is that the web now offers lots of great possibilities to those who want to create history for broad audiences, and in non-print, non-linear formats. If you find something great, share it here. If you see an interesting (or just plain woeful) film or radio doco, share your thoughts on it here too. During your honours year you need to start honing your skills of critical analysis, so short reviews of history in whatever form you find it are welcome.
Finally, to my title. At a recent forum about history and media, I was asked, 'how do you sleep at night? The guy who asked was horrified at the amount of crappy television history there is out there and wondered how I, as a historian, could sit comfortably with the inevitable compromises and challenges involved in translating historical knowledge for large audiences. I wonder what you all think - over to you on that one...
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3 comments:
Media censorship issues aside, I think one of the main reasons for such compromises and more importantly constant retellings of these repeated narratives is that there seem to be too little focus on the life of the common man in history.
The majority of historical accounts focus on kings, generals and other supposedly "relevent" individuals, despite the fact that it is ordinary people who really do all the work. Perhaps there should be more TV programs like The Worst Jobs in History and less on the works of Aristotle. Eventhough in many cases the common man could not write down or log his memoirs in any real way, their lives were really what shaped the course of history, their crude artifacts and tools paving the way for many of today's modern innovations.
To cut a long story short, perhaps the academic schoolroom approach to history needs to be re-evaluated and set aside to focus more on the practicle side. In the same way in which many Medieval serfs couldn't care less what their monarchs were doing, thats how many people think about it now. Today's audience want edutainment: which is informative but at the same time fun, after all many non-students only really use television for escapism.
I think in today's day and age, there has been a splintering of history, ones who ascribe to the 'pure' academics of it, and one who have 'sold out' and can be seen as famous as the sociologists during the 60's and 70's (Marshall McLuhan we're looking at you).
There is an abundance of very crappy history programs, but there are also quite a substantial amount of crappy history theses and published material. The difference I think is ultimately the audience, with the history programs being shown as a form of edutainment, being ultimately unaware of any historiographical issues with such 'crappy' history shows.
We hear it all the time in popular culture, things like Friends, where Joey suggest peeing on Monica's leg after she'd been stung by a jellyfish, based on nothing more than the fact he'd seen it in a documentary. It isn't restricted to history, and I'm sure it will continue like this.
The issue I think is not whether there are crappy shows, and how we can sleep at night knowing that they're out there, rather we should ask if there are 'troublesome' documentaries, are there resources and ways for people to investigate such matters further and ultimately find a more 'correct' (and I use the term loosely, knowing the whole singular truth thing is fairly contentious) version of the event or person in question?
I think that with the Internet, there has been a massive archiving of information and it is becoming easier to find such information with a few clicks of the button. The usual suspects Google and Wikipedia spring to mind, but nowdays, we can find information from any number of places, journals and official websites, even university public sites. And I think there is a movement which is starting to view alternative locations of history and/or information such as reviews, blogs, and forums. No longer is learning confined to long distance letters with an academic on the other side of the world, or even with an 'academic' in the traditional sense of the word. People can now equip themselves with the information they find and discuss it with the unlucky historian at the dinner party.
Again I concede that this isn't perfect, and in many cases information can be just as bad as those found in crappy history shows, but why should I lose sleep on the crappiness of some historian, when I know I can write/critique his entire approach for my next published work/thesis/essay :)
In response to Gareth's 're-thinking' of a more practical history, I agree with the re-thinking part, but find the term 'practical' disturbing. If by practical he means, I think, that we make it more relevant and 'appealing' to the masses and teach it in this light, then I think we essentially are in no better a position as we are currently. The search for a singular truth, or an objective history may be a lofty perch which none of us can ever reach, but I think that it should still underpin the essence of what history is about, the attempt to record, store, archive and retell history as mindful of the historiographical problems historians face in this day and age.
Additionally I think that innately that normal people ARE creating their own history. The 'stars' will always get more attention, its just the way our society works, whether they be kings, queens, sportspeople, or criminals, there will always be more attention paid on those that are 'different' in society. But at the same time, I think now more than ever, with literary standards amongst the general populace being a far reach greater than in history, and our new methods of storing information, we are privileged enough to be able to make blogs, forum posts, CVs, facebook/myspace profiles, census surveys, credit card bills, internet search histories. If they survive for another 200-400 years, someone could most likely piece together a prosopography of the common '21st Centurian' through these details!
I think I got carried away with this reply *chuckles*
Both Gareth and Mike have raised questions about the role of the media in education - if the media is the place we learn about the past (among other things) then what do we do if the history that it tells is distorted, wrong, or perpetuates the same old perspectives?
Online forums and discussion sites are one place for people to challenge things they see on telly, but if they don't know they're wrong/distorted/innacuate in the first place, then this isn't going to be very useful. Academic debates over 'controversial' histories can take years to play out in print, so this isn't going to be a useful model for dealing with problematic media histories.
I think Mike's suggestion that the internet is going to make it easier for people to challenge histories they find offensive/problematic is a good one - certainly the freedom that YouTube etc gives to people to 'speak back' to mainstream media representations is heartening (and on that front, has everyone seen the parodies of Daniel Day-Lewis' 'I drink your milkshake!' speech on YouTube? ) I guess your average historical documentary is less likely to provoke intense debate, but it might inspire someone to search the net for more information.
And yes, people are making their own histories, and in new places - my one reservation about the proliferation of history across the net, is are we going to have a situation where everyone is creating and no-one is reading? Are people only going to be interested in their own history, rather than thinking about the national, or the global?
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