Communications in an Electronic Age

I had a friend once who wrote his thesis on the value of oral testimony when writing about modern history—you have to understand this was a long time ago, perhaps thirty years or so: the external examiner did not pass the dissertation because he said the candidate used too much oral testimony.  It did not matter that what the witnesses said provided information that was not recorded in published documents, stored in government archives, or been collected by interviewers asking people to answer specific questions or tick boxes on a list.  The ebb and flow of conversations as they opened memories, raised old angers, anxieties, enthusiasms and interests, none of that mattered to the great professor brought up in the old school.  The arts of analysis and interpretation simply did not take into account the compilation of long recordings, allowing elderly people to ramble from what they thought they were being asked to say into re-entering the worlds of their youth and their prime, creating patterns of revelation and barriers of denial and distortion.  There was no way, this pontiff of historical method asserted, for consideration of hesitations, changes in the tone of voice, self-corrections or attempts to cover over delicate points, various versions of the same incident told at different times in the recording. 

It all seems so obvious now.  But then we have the contemporary debate over the value of the internet both as an instrument of scholarship and a source of information.  The arguments against usually fall into one or some combination of the following: there is no editorial control, anyone can put in his or her opinion, can make up whatever they like, ridiculous combinations or conjunctions of topics are created which make only superficial—or no—sense together by way of rational logic, chronology, or psychological rules.  But these supposed faults prove to be highly provocative, pregnant virtues.  Outside the official methodologies of academe the online researcher is able to put things together in new exciting ways, to discover facts that usually fly or float below the radar of what is considered important by the establishment, and opinions about the world people usually hide from official audiences are expressed—and it is good sometimes to study the nature of prejudice, enthusiasm, anxiety and fear.  Of course, once you start to locate information on the internet, you can begin to locate other evidence to verify these possibilities, to adjust current paradigms to a wider range of facts and opinions, and to identify people, events, and places mentioned, and to read books mentioned or alluded to. 

One of the opportunities opened up by the internet for me lies in the vast number of books, articles, images, and recordings that is otherwise available to someone stuck at the bottom of the world and in an obscure corner of it.  While not everything is there in the dark reaches of cyberspace, there are sufficient hints for me to try to find books in libraries, to prowl used bookshops and book fairs, to contact people whose existence was not conceived of before—or at least to have access to their addresses.  Especially now that I am retired from the university and no longer have students to talk to, colleagues to meet, and research funds to travel overseas, the internet and the email are lifelines to a somewhat imperfect but still important intellectual world out beyond the horizon.  

On the other hand, when I read about the increasing attempts by bigots and fools to take over academic associations, to engage in unseemly campaigns of boycotting Israel, to close-down debates and shut visiting speakers up with loud, unruly demonstrations, to substitute political correctness for free inquiry and discussions, well, then I am quite happy to be no longer connected to that scholarly universe.  The scholarly profession just ain’t what it used to be.

Instead, except for writing a few books every year or so, and a small number of essays and book reviews that get printed in journals whose editors I respect and vice versa, this Blog seems an acceptable substitute.  I wish there were more responses, but at my age perhaps it is best not to have too many engagements of that sort.  Seemly discussions are preferable to heated arguments at my age.