Narrow Histories
"Despite the internet’s staggering scale and global reach, its folk histories are surprisingly narrow. This mismatch reflects the uncertain definition of 'the internet.'" (Driscoll 20)
This got me thinking about how narrow our historical lenses can be. If someone posed this question to me as Driscoll did to his students (the question being where did the internet come from) 4 months ago, I would have had to google it. Is it ironic to use a product of the internet to find out where it came from?
This thing that I access every day for nearly 2 decades, and I hardly knew a thing about it. It took a century of expansion and growth in the world of technology to get us to where we are today, why do we know learn more about it in school? The history of the internet as we have learned in it in this class covers so many topics that could be valuable to explore in our curriculum.
Citational Information¶
Driscoll, Kevin. “A Prehistory of Social Media.” Issues in Science and Technology 38, no. 4 (Summer 2022): 20–23, http://issues.org/prehistory-social-media-modem-world-driscoll/.