Modern technology may actually make it possible to provide an entirely unbiased account of history. Things like pictures and video recording are about as close as it's possible to get to an exact reflection of reality, as they just show the images and/or sounds that were present at the time, and nothing more. Unlike things such as paintings from the past, they contain virtually no input besides setting a camera up, giving them much less human influence. A future historian who watches a video of an event will get a nearly identical experience to someone who was actually there at the time, and as recording technology improves this will become even more true. While this won't affect much about the history of things long before the present day, it means that this, modern, time period will be far more well-documented than any previous. This may even make the entire idea of a postmodern history unnecessary at some point, as all events would be preserved in such a way that they can be accessed and experienced again as they were, eliminating mistakes that humans may make when recounting something that happened to them or bias that affects the way they record it, as it will be virtually impossible to misrepresent history with this type of recording, unless it was done intentionally.
Friday, February 5, 2016
History of the Future
In class discussions recently, we've been talking a lot about the fact that it's more or less impossible to have a completely factual view of history, as some personal bias will invariably seep in to any historical book or record and give it some sort of narrative it's trying to tell. Even primary sources that provide information about the ancient world are for large part not physical evidence, but written accounts by people who witnessed the events. Potential inaccuracies in these sources, as well as some ulterior motive or prejudice that the writer holds ("history is written by the victors") means that many of them can't be trusted to give a complete story, leading to the idea of a "postmodernist history" that we discussed, where it's accepted that not everything can be known and that history contains some lies.
However, it's not certain that this distrust of even primary sources will always be necessary. I was thinking about how the types of evidence that we have for older times compare to more recent sources, and how the methods of recording events that we currently have will eventually be used to look back on our society. To start, the sheer amount of information that is contained on the internet will mean that there will be a much higher volume of written sources to draw from. This still brings up the same concerns about biased or flawed writing, though, and many of these things still can't be entirely trusted, as they are a human attempt to create a narrative.
Modern technology may actually make it possible to provide an entirely unbiased account of history. Things like pictures and video recording are about as close as it's possible to get to an exact reflection of reality, as they just show the images and/or sounds that were present at the time, and nothing more. Unlike things such as paintings from the past, they contain virtually no input besides setting a camera up, giving them much less human influence. A future historian who watches a video of an event will get a nearly identical experience to someone who was actually there at the time, and as recording technology improves this will become even more true. While this won't affect much about the history of things long before the present day, it means that this, modern, time period will be far more well-documented than any previous. This may even make the entire idea of a postmodern history unnecessary at some point, as all events would be preserved in such a way that they can be accessed and experienced again as they were, eliminating mistakes that humans may make when recounting something that happened to them or bias that affects the way they record it, as it will be virtually impossible to misrepresent history with this type of recording, unless it was done intentionally.
Modern technology may actually make it possible to provide an entirely unbiased account of history. Things like pictures and video recording are about as close as it's possible to get to an exact reflection of reality, as they just show the images and/or sounds that were present at the time, and nothing more. Unlike things such as paintings from the past, they contain virtually no input besides setting a camera up, giving them much less human influence. A future historian who watches a video of an event will get a nearly identical experience to someone who was actually there at the time, and as recording technology improves this will become even more true. While this won't affect much about the history of things long before the present day, it means that this, modern, time period will be far more well-documented than any previous. This may even make the entire idea of a postmodern history unnecessary at some point, as all events would be preserved in such a way that they can be accessed and experienced again as they were, eliminating mistakes that humans may make when recounting something that happened to them or bias that affects the way they record it, as it will be virtually impossible to misrepresent history with this type of recording, unless it was done intentionally.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
I agree that modern technology can give us a much more objective view of any event. Like you said, videos and recordings are pretty much as close as we are gonna get to being able to recreate events in history. But at the same time, videos can also have perspective and show only one side of an event.
ReplyDeleteThis is an awfully optimistic view of the perpetual video surveillance and omnipresent personal-recording devices that permeate our culture. It's true that we're producing more data--or "information," as it used to be called--than ever before. And it makes sense that more data would yield a more complete historical narrative.
ReplyDeleteA good case in point might be the call for body cameras on police officers--so we don't just depend on the fallible and subjective police report to record the history; we get an "objective" record of how a traffic stop went down, or whatever. And no doubt, video evidence has been decisive in turning around recent cases in Chicago and elsewhere, cases that likely would have gone nowhere without the video.
But the JFK case, which we'll discuss later in the year, serves as counter-evidence: there is no shortage of *facts* around this story, and indeed we even have footage of the shooting itself. But the narrative remains more disputed than any other historical narrative in American history.
Or the Rodney King beatings, which led to the LA Riots of 1992: there was this strong feeling that the video footage showed clear evidence of police brutality, but a jury acquitted all the officers, mostly under the influence of oral arguments about what *preceded* the video.
I'm not trying to present a fully optimistic view about the increased surveillance that's becoming present, as there are clearly some negative things about that, I'm just saying that, as it relates to our discussions in class, it is somewhat able to provide an objective view of history. Also, with things like the examples you gave where video evidence was not sufficient, I feel like there's still a difference in that the only problem is having not enough footage, as opposed to human-produced accounts, where no matter how many there are, there's still some doubt about them.
DeleteI think the fact that there is still controversy surrounding the events you've mentioned is evidence of the dramatic effect that video/photo recordings have had on the modern historical narrative. Although the internet's vast connectivity has allowed for various narratives/metanarratives as interpretation of a video for instance, the truth exists there before us, and is merely up to interpretation. The truth of more ancient events on the other hand may be lost forever.
DeleteI instantly thought of the Police body cameras like Mr. Mitchell. They are supposed to function just as you said, providing a unbiased opinion on the events they are recording. These recordings can be extremely influential when used in the right way, but unfortunately they are often tampered with. Before the prevalence of the video camera, a dirty police officer might have been able to just drop a tazer next to someones body and say they attacked him because it would be his word against someone else's. Since it is far harder to tamper with the evidence in post due to the recordings, the recording devices themselves now have to be tampered with, which ultimately leads us back to the same problem of biased presentations of history as we had before.
ReplyDelete