Let's Get Digital, Digital

When the world starts to get too confusing, we often turn back for a nostalgic look at the past. For me, it was a return to the eternal wisdom of Olivia Newton-John. She cries out: "Let's get physical, physical. I wanna get physical, let's get into physical." While this motto has been successful for millions of years (or at least the 1980s), it is certainly not the slogan of our post-Y2K generation. It is no longer about getting physical, but about getting digital! The conflicting approaches, the intellectual battles, the death-cries of Luddites, we are all at the mercy of technology. Com'on! Everybody is doing it...

And we are. Just as we waved sadly goodbye to the Beta videotape player (despite their better quality) and on to the VHS, so are we now thrust by market forces greater than ourselves into purchasing the "latest" in digital technology. Every time there is a substantial technological "improvement" (and I say that heavy with irony), we are at their mercy. Eventually they stop making beta tapes, VHS, etc., so that we are forced to buy a whole new system in order to participate. In short, we become consumerized victims of technology. I could download Olivia right now without ever having bought a vinyl, a tape, or a CD; however, I will have had to buy a computer. With digital cable, we no longer need VHS, DVD or the employees of Blockbuster, to watch a movie; but, we do need to buy a modem. And I don't even need to get out of my chair and have any human contact whatsoever to do any of these things.

So who or what, in fact, do we need?

What we still need, and as far as I can tell will always need, are the teachers. To know what literature is we need the English teachers and professors; to know about technology we need the science classes (and yes, even Digital History); and to know our past we need to know our History. As public historians, we are all hoping to enter a field based upon the idea of bringing history with all of its educational baggage to the people. Raise your textbooks loud and proud.

But, we spend so much time theorizing about what history is and how to present it, that I wonder what answers are being provided. Tribal historians, the bards and community leaders, knew how to remember and present the history that was important for the tribe. Every generation passed down the stories and traditions to their apprentices and successors. There was a conclusion, an answer to the questions, that ensured the survival of their people both physically, and through the stories. Today, we are so bogged down in the theory of history that we have no straight answer to the questions history raises. Historians should be bards, but instead we are politicians.

The big bonus of the Internet and digital images of collections is having all that knowledge accessible and available for use to a wider range of people. And that is a wonderful thing. But we forget that the Internet is a tool. Not the teacher. We need the teacher, the leader, to show us what to do with this information. It is not that we need our hand held, we all crawled out of the swamp equally, but I think that living in the age of abundant information does not mean we live in an age of abundant knowledge.

We may have left the simple wisdom of Olivia Newton-John in the blurry decade of the 80s, but her message need not be forgotten. Sometimes, it's as simple as getting a little physical. I am all for the digital availability of the Internet, but as consumers - of products and of knowledge - we won't be able to keep up with the constant changes without our teachers. Change is sometimes forced upon us - such as when we have to buy a DVD player because VHS tapes aren't made any more - but, if we have been taught well, we will know what to do about it. The "getting digital" ship may have sailed, but hopefully those manning its direction took some swimming lessons.