A Personal Exploration of Digital History

Just as with any other form of conveying information from one party to another, the new wave of digital communication and preservation has both advantages and disadvantages. For anyone who has ever spent more than a few minutes on a Wiki page of some sort, it is clear that information on the Internet has the potential to be either highly credible and informative or misleading and facetious. In some cases, tit is even possible to observe a blending of the two within the confines of a single paragraph. However, this sort of freedom in the sharing of information and ideas also provides a forum for discussion on less popular or more personal topics in a more peer-to-peer conversational format, or at least with more personal experience pertaining to the problems associated with everyday life, instead of just lofty ideas encased in elevated language. Is this aspect of the Internet an advantage or a disadvantage as we move forward with the use of the Internet as a source of historical information?

“Like postmodernism, the Internet does not distinguish between the true and the false, the important and the trivial, the enduring and the ephemeral. . . . Every source appearing on the screen has the same weight and credibility as every other; no authority is ‘privileged’ over any other.”

[Quote in context found here.]

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Whether you have stumbled across this blog via some misguided Google search or actively sought it out, you have now officially found my blog. Congratulations! Now that you have made it past the first few sentences without frantically closing your browser, I would like to give you a little insight into what this project is all about. Who am I exactly? I am a new student at George Mason University preparing to embark on the next chapter of my life as a student. As part of this journey, I will be acquainting myself with the new and rapidly expanding field of digital history. This leads to the purpose of this blog: recording my personal relationship with this area of my studies. So whether you are a sadist wishing to watch me struggle or interested in a new twist on history, stay tuned as I join the realm of digital history in my own way.