History, Disrupted

Accuracy or the agreement of experts is not a necessity. Social media platforms and Web searches, then, are a dialectical creation between the user and the machine: we give the algorithm information as to what content might cause us to spend more time on the platform, and, in turn, the algorithm attempts to maximize our time on the platform by leveraging our data to deliver content we’ll engage with. We influence the algorithm and the algorithm influences us. The platforms and users are in an iterative process to become more efficient.

Some e-history is created by professional historians; others by journalists, hobbyists, teachers, teenagers, political operatives, hostile foreign actors, blockchain users and computational programs. Some e-history has educational intent; some has nefarious intent. All are driven by agendas, be it the promotion of a person, a brand, an ideology, a discipline or a set of values. Different e-history rely on different mechanisms to achieve visibility and influence: crowd-sourcing, digital nostalgia, virality, visually arresting, newsworthy, storytelling or via AI. But the most visible and influential e-history tend to mirror the values of the Web itself. The chief result has been not a more sophisticated understanding of the past among non-historians that rely on the social Web for information, but rather the embedding of the values of the social Web deeper into our lives, the characteristics of e-history coming to represent all history, online and offline. e-history has made the practice of history chiefly about the changing conditions for visible Web content rather than discerning with fidelity and rigor what may have happened in the past.

The resulting e-history landscape compels individuals across the globe to make sense of this dizzying universe of material created by a myriad of actors with an array of agendas, in no chronological order, atomized as part of millions of feeds, rising and falling in visibility and urgency with the news cycle and popularity of different platforms, and with little-to-no assistance on how to evaluate and interpret it.

[...]

[...] e-history cobbled together from across the Web without structure, curation or media literacy can lead any of us to darker places, especially among the vulnerable and impressionable.

The burden [of change and adaptation] is not solely on professional historians and Web users, though. Web developers, Web designers, Silicon Valley and corporations have a responsibility to ensure that the next iteration of the Web values and prioritises incentives beyond speed, scale and commerce. The decentralized and semantic Web must incentivise rigor, patience and thoughtfulness, not solely income and enthusiasm. This will be even more crucial as blockchain and AI advance us toward a hyper-individualized Web. Every aspect of our lives is becoming digitised and commercialized: our likeness, our personalities, our relationships, our identities, our tastes, our memories, our assets, our travel and our biology. Companies such as Rally.io even use our social capital as the basis for our own currencies. To corporate America and Silicon Valley, we are each a unique portfolio of data that can be mined for revenue – or that we, ourselves, are compelled to generate revenue from as we are pushed further into gig-work and the creator economy.¹⁴

[...]

[...] That fragmentary and hyper-individualized form of history education in the United States may lead to a greater apathy toward laborious, painstaking humanities research that has no explicit utilitarian, brand-building or argument winning function, as well as further declines in history enrollments, history funding and history degrees as history education becomes increasingly outsourced and corporatised. If we continue to privilege the e-history that delivers instantaneous results and the shortest distance between two points, our desire to flex the opposite muscles atrophy. If we continue to privilege the e-history that helps us win arguments about the present, as opposed to histories that make arguments that help us better understand the past, our desire to support the histories that cannot be immediately mobilized in support of a political, personal or commercial agenda becomes weaker. We over-value the histories that result from speed, enthusiasm, efficiency and media logic and under-value the longer-term work that makes such e-history possible. Surface-level understandings of the past become de rigueur as a means to build a brand, gain social currency or advance a political agenda. Those selected and edited histories become so privileged in our minds that we lose the ability to think outside of them. Our understanding of the past vis-à-vis history becomes like the stars amid the broader galaxy. A @HistoryIn Pics photograph or an #OTD factoid is the bright shiny object that we see; but what led up to the photograph and what happened after the event are the dark energy and dark matter that make up 95 percent of the rest of the story. e-history shows us the 5 percent of shiny objects and deceives us into thinking we know the whole universe. In reality, it is the space between the shiny objects where the deepest mysteries are, along with the truest understandings.¹⁶