History is Dead

“He had been taught, of course, that history, along with geography was dead. That history in the older sense was an historical concept. History in the older sense was narrative, stories we told ourselves about where we’d come from and what it had been like, and those narratives were revised by each new generation, and indeed always had been. History was plastic, was a matter of interpretation. The digital had not so much changed that as made it too obvious to ignore. History was stored data, subject to manipulation and interpretation¹.”

I was thinking about this today. Thinking about data and life-blogging and the interconnectedness of it all. Thinking about our insatiable urge to record and archive and protect. It’s interesting to think we are merely recording a perspective. One side of the story that, in time, often becomes the only side to the story. A defacto standard.

From the above, you could write: “If you control data, you control history,” and I guess this has always been the case. I just don’t think it has ever been so immediate as in the present. This new age of citizen journalism and the power of the blogocracy means that any one person can disseminate very targeted information, and that information can be spread incredibly rapidly. Look at Digg. Look at Newsvine. Think about memes. Once something goes viral it cannot be stopped. If that information later turns out to be false, or slanderous, or spread with malicious intent, in most cases the damage has already been done and potential millions have already seen, read, and formed opinions upon it.

So if you want to slander someone, you find their personal life and you put it on the internet. Which brings us back to life-blogging².

It seems that every day I get a new invite for some new web2.0 service offering to record some other facet of my life, and compare it with others. Is your book list as good as theirs? Are you drinking in line with your peers? Are you gay? What about religion, huh? What do you think about that?

It’s scary how much information people are willing to share, and it often worries me how much people rely on security through obscurity. Think about anything, everything, you’ve ever written and put on the internet. Regardless of whether it’s still there, regardless of the alias, the email address, or the IP it was posted from. What if that was all traceable right back to you? What if someone could look at anonymous public mentions and link it to you. What if the person reading that information was your next potential employer? Your mother? Your ex?

This isn’t going anywhere, and I’m certainly not preaching³: more information about me, and things I’ve done, can be found on the internet than I’d like. If you look hard enough, and if you know where to look, you can find some truly cringe-worthy things I wrote years ago. Things that I no longer have any control over and could not remove even if I wanted to. At least here, on the blog, I am responsible for dissemination and, for now, I can control this particular piece of history. So I will manipulate, and you can interpret, and I think that’s how it goes.

¹ William Gibson – All Tomorrow’s Parties

² I think Glebe once called it “Egoshooting.”

³ But if you are interested, the Australian Government published a decent primer on protecting your privacy on the internet.

Posted in Rant on Wednesday January 3, 2007.