ABSTRACT
When Time magazine decided to elect ‘You’ its person of the year for 2006, the point was that the tools of media and cultural production had been taken over by the consumer: 2006 was a story ‘about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before’, and, portentously, ‘about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the world, but also change the way the world changes’.1 Web 2.0, the various innovative tools and techniques upgrading the internet’s communications and compatibility framework, opened up wide interactive possibilities. These were seized upon by various key brands, all of which suggested that they devolved programming and content power to the end-user: Google (search engine), MySpace and Facebook (social networking), and YouTube (DIY broadcast space).2 Part of the potentiality of this new generation of programmes was the hybridisation of software – essentially splicing and rewriting freely circulated (open-source) code; also known (no longer pejoratively) as ‘hacking’ or mashup.3 This kind of revolutionary grasping of the means of production by the savvy independent information consumer has been part of the idealised version of the internet and associated information technologies ever since its inception.4
However, 2006 seemed to be the tipping point, both in terms of participation (millions of users), cultural consequence (‘Google’ entered the Oxford English Dictionary as a verb) and community significance. Does this make any difference to history? Ludmilla Jordanova queries the
revolutionary impact of the internet: ‘it already has altered modes of learning and teaching, access to original sources and to information’, yet she argues that it ‘remains unclear in 2005 precisely how the internet will radically transform, if at all, the nature of historical scholarship’.5 Many professional historians are sceptical of the validity of the web both as repository of information and as research tool.6 This chapter argues that the way that people engage with history currently is fundamentally interactive, and it follows that the internet and the suite of tools for it known generally as Web 2.0 can work to challenge structures and hierarchies of knowledge. Therefore the way that historical information is presented, engaged with, searched and protected online is crucial, something
archivists have known for some time but historians are slowly noticing. The global knowledge economy includes ‘history’ and as such information relating to the past has become currency. It is within this context that any discussion of the information consumption must now take place, and it is a context which is constantly shifting away from older models of interpretation: ‘The new global economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing center-periphery models.’7 The information revolution fundamentally changes the paradigms for understanding, engaging with, and owning the past.8
