Has historical study changed in the digital era? What happens when the Gutenberg period is succeeded by the internet period? Undeniably in our time the internet plays a crucial role both in communication as well as in information. What kind of changes have been effected on the discipline of history by the digitalization of information?
If we seek to determine the characteristics of the digital era, we will realize that the parameters mainly influenced are the speed and volume of information. A seminal consequence of the influence of Information Society is the acceleration of all processes, a fact that keeps users in a state of vigilance and in a permanent process of updating their knowledge, in a permanent state of alert. In the digital world, solutions of communication that up to now were inapplicable, today begin to materialize.
The volume of information carried via networks is rapidly accelerating. Billions of e-mails and sms run through our planet daily. During the recent years the messages have become more complex, transporting accompanying files mainly photographs and videos, as attachments.
A large part of this information is recorded and a percentage ends in the internet. Human history now walks hand in hand with the machines and the conjunction of human being and machine has already become centerfold in human life and experience.
Questions raised by the digitalization of information
No era has left in its wake so many visual and audio traces as ours. Should we pity the future historian who will be forced to also study the terabytes of the electronic files that are created daily? There are historians who predict the demise of historiography, while others are heralding the explosion of information as the beginning of "real" History.
One thing is certain, the model of historical writing of the past century cannot possibly serve the next one. The epistemology of History will have to change, if historians wish to continue recounting the... [continues]
If we seek to determine the characteristics of the digital era, we will realize that the parameters mainly influenced are the speed and volume of information. A seminal consequence of the influence of Information Society is the acceleration of all processes, a fact that keeps users in a state of vigilance and in a permanent process of updating their knowledge, in a permanent state of alert. In the digital world, solutions of communication that up to now were inapplicable, today begin to materialize.
The volume of information carried via networks is rapidly accelerating. Billions of e-mails and sms run through our planet daily. During the recent years the messages have become more complex, transporting accompanying files mainly photographs and videos, as attachments.
A large part of this information is recorded and a percentage ends in the internet. Human history now walks hand in hand with the machines and the conjunction of human being and machine has already become centerfold in human life and experience.
Questions raised by the digitalization of information
No era has left in its wake so many visual and audio traces as ours. Should we pity the future historian who will be forced to also study the terabytes of the electronic files that are created daily? There are historians who predict the demise of historiography, while others are heralding the explosion of information as the beginning of "real" History.
One thing is certain, the model of historical writing of the past century cannot possibly serve the next one. The epistemology of History will have to change, if historians wish to continue recounting the... [continues]
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