By Jessica Reed
“I think the unspoken agreement between us as a culture is that we’re not supposed to consider the commercialized memories in our heads as real, that real life consists of time spent away from TVs, magazines and theaters. But soon the planet will be entirely populated by people who have only known a world of TVs and computers”
"Blogs aim to record everyday life" - When I read the BBC headline this morning I thought ot was quite a redundant and clumsy one: except fo corporate and journalistic blogs, what function could a blog possibly have? Online journals are primarily used by young people to network, post pictures, thoughts and comments on their own lives. In other words, blogs do not "aim" to record everyday life, they already do - millions of self-published daily routines at a time.
However the rest of the article proved me wrong; what the headline really announced was the launch of "One day in History", a National Trust initiative looking to encourage thousands of Britons to send their own diary entries about their own life as of the 17th of October, 2006, effectively turning the website into "Britain's biggest blog". The goal is to create a 'social history archive of everyday life' for future generations.
If the concept is admirable (saving thousands of personal entries in a safe database for history, research or simple future curiosity's sake), it does sound like the blogosphere and its social networks counterparts are already doing a great job at saving, tagging and tracking all written content.
The historical aim of History Matters might be the most interesting side of the project: as David Cannadine of the Institute of Historical research told the BBC, "it may be that historians in the future will be amazed that on 17 October 2006 we were still eating meat or driving privately owned cars".
Fair enough, but what about trying to get the bigger picture? Our generations (Baby-Bommers, their children and grand-children) were no longer defined by wars or state of economic recessions. The idealist revolutions of the 60s are now obsolete and non-applicable in a context of massive globalisation where they lost meaning. The 90s' "Generation X" suffered from both historical overdosing and historical slumming.
In this context, we (as members of our own generation) are defined by events of a more ecletic nature, more often than not formated and disseminated thanks to new media and new technologies of information and communication, which we use not only to network, but create and spread popular memories and culture. The good old fashionned television is not solely responsible for the prodcution of "pop content" or even "junk culture", we are actively taking part of it: we build websites, post comments, debate in forums, store personal pictures and videos. We network, we remix, copy and paste: we are increasingly the bottom-up creators, publishers and authors of our own sources of entertainement (within limits, of course). I wonder if the thousands of blog entries sent today will reflect this shift 50 or 100 years from now.
