Downloading and Web 2.0 have famously led to new ways of accessing culture. But these have tended to be parasitic on old media. The law of Web 2.0 is that everything comes back, whether it be adverts, public information films or long-forgotten TV serials: history happens first as tragedy, then as YouTube.
Among the current discussions, the impact of new and sophisticated methods in the study of the past occupies an important place. The new 'scientific' or 'cliometric' history-born of the marriage contracted between historical problems and advanced statistical analysis, with economic theory as bridesmaid and the computer as best man-has made tremendous advances in the last generation.
We talked about the Internet and Wikipedia and how facts and history are being collectively created online.
I was at Harvard when Mark Zuckerberg created Facebook, and I begged him not to do it.
If we don't record our own history on the Net, it will disappear.
When we heard that little dial-up sound, that eeeeee, and then you connected, and you then go and you check your mail and you get that 'you got mail,' you were excited. I mean, that was the thing.
AOL invented social networking.
Social media might one day offer a dazzling, and even overwhelming, array of source material for historians.
Remember when those CD-ROMs from AOL came in the mail almost every day? The company was considered ubiquitous, invincible. Former AOL CEO Steve Case was no less a genius than Mark Zuckerberg.
In this way, history now inscribes itself in real time, in the 'live', in the realm of interactivity. Consequently, history no longer resides in the extension of territory.
