Abstract
This article examines the complex and powerful relationship between the internet and public history. It explores how public history is being experienced and practiced in a digital world where ‘you’ – both public historians and laypeople – are made powerful through using the world wide web. Web 2.0 is a dynamic terrain that provides both opportunities and challenges to the creation of history. While it may facilitate more open, democratic history making, the internet simultaneously raises questions about gatekeeping, authority and who has the right to speak for the past. Though the web provides new avenues for distributing historical information, how these are used and by whom remain pressing questions.
Highlights
In 2006, TIME magazine chose to open its feature article by ‘exposing’ common misconceptions about history and the people who make it
It informed its readers that the past was not ‘the biography of great men’ as historians like Thomas Carlyle had famously written
It was ‘a story about community and collaboration’; history was about ordinary people who were shaping the world.[1]
Summary
Bringing together the small contributions of millions of people and making them matter.’ For this productive effort, ‘You’, the average person, became TIME’s person of the year.[3]. Online forums, blogs, portable devices, apps, mobile phones, tablets, social media and the other, countless array of digital platforms have facilitated a greater degree of ‘user engagement’, where anyone with access to the web is able to contribute to understandings about the past. Through these new avenues, ideas about history have been able to span countries, cultures and languages and reach more people than ever before. It analyses how public historians and ordinary people are navigating the field, as well as their issues, concerns and successes in harnessing these new technologies to engage with the past in the present
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