Students are living in the age of the Tweet, in which information is presented in a limited, fragmented manner, according to Dr. Robert Darnton .
CHASS’s history department invited Darnton to give a lecture titled “Blogging Now and Then (250 Years Ago)” as part of History Weekend.
Robert Darnton is the Carl H. Pforzheimer University Professor and Director of the Harvard University Library. In 1984, he wrote The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History, which has been translated into 16 languages.
“One must discuss history and try to make connections with the present,” Darnton said at his lecture Saturday. His lecture followed the development of how information travels.
Darnton said, contrary to many scholars’ opinions, every age has been an information age.
According to Darnton , the best way to follow this train of information is to pay strict attention to online gossip and scandal mongering.
Some of the specific forms of scandal mongering explored during the lecture were “paragraphs” and anecdotes of London and France during the eighteenth century.
While Paris’ media was censored due to revolution, England had a booming journalistic culture.
The lecture entertained a wide variety of history students and staff. Even some bloggers were there.
Joyska Nunez, freshman in history, is an avid blogger who attended the event.
“I wanted to see the parallels between blogging now and then,” Nunez said.
Nunez said her blog doesn’t really focus on gossip mongering, but rather follows her own life. She concedes it is a great way to reflect on the time we live in and gauge how we live our lives.
“Historians looking at our time now will look through articles, and things from blogs and see what’s interesting to us,” Nunez said, “that makes up a lot of history too, the small people, not just the people who made a difference.”
While tracing the evolution of blogging, Darnton was firm in his belief that there exist more differences than similarities between the anecdotes and paragraphs of the past to the blogs today. And yet, it is the deep interest in scandal and gossip that link the three.
Megan Brown, sophomore in history, stated that, when viewed critically, one could see modern gossip as a viable form of information.
Eighteenth century anecdotes and paragraphs were often understood to be half-truths. Darnton presented examples of such articles, many of them teasing the reader with the quote “Half of this article is true.”
Gossip was condensed into brief sentences, a small paragraph in length, and squeezed in between legitimate news stories. Paragraphs were piled on top of each other in autonomous units, with no headlines, and information came in “tidbits” in a succession of unrelated paragraphs.
Nuggets of information were so popular that people collected them, copied them and pasted them into scrapbooks. Most of the information was picked from different sources and condensed together. Darnton said that this was standard practice, even in legitimate news sources.
”These are objects worthy of serious study,” Darnton said, “we can see how communication passed orally to circulation, [and then] to print.”
While these scrapbooks are of great value to historians looking back on the time, their creators are generally anonymous. Conversely, by todays standard, most everything posted on the Internet carries the footprint of its original author.
Brown thinks this permanence of material on the Internet will affect how future historians search, and view information from our age, specifically when it comes to detailed research.
”When you are researching history further back, you have to find the details, where, as the future looking back at us, it’ll be finding which details,” Brown said.