The Internet - how it shapes the past and the future
Thinking Allowed
BBC
4.4 • 997 Ratings
🗓️ 21 December 2022
⏱️ 29 minutes
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Summary
The Internet and time – how the World Wide Web has transformed our understanding of history as well as the future.
Laurie Taylor talks to Jason Steinhauer, public historian and Global Fellow at the Wilson Centre, Washington, DC, whose latest study argues that the tangled complexity of history that we see via Instagram and Twitter is leading to an impoverished, even a distorted knowledge of the past. Algorithms play in a big role in determining the versions of history which we are seeing. Content does not rise to the top of news feeds based on its scholarly or factual merits. Political agendas and commercial agendas are almost always at play. So how can we become more discerning consumers of historical knowledge?
They're joined by Helga Nowotny, Professor Emerita of Social Studies of Science a ETH Zurich, whose research suggests that our dependence on predictive algorithms might be closing down the horizon of our future, giving us a feeling of control whilst narrowing our choices.
Producer: Jayne Egerton
Transcript
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| 0:47.0 | Hello history at my Christian brother school was taught in much the same way as the |
| 0:52.4 | Catholic Catagism. |
| 0:53.7 | Whereas in our R.R.I. classes we learned that the six sins against chastity were lust, masturbation, |
| 0:59.6 | fornication, pornography, prostitution, and rape. |
| 1:03.0 | So in our history classes we were informed that the six causes of the French Revolution |
| 1:08.0 | were social inequality, the tax burden on the third estate, the rise of the bourgeoisie, |
| 1:12.4 | the writings of the philosophers, the monetary crisis, and poor |
| 1:15.8 | harvests. |
| 1:17.3 | There was all in all an implicit assumption that historical facts had the same eternal veracity as God's |
| 1:25.3 | commandments. But a new book argues that the internet has destroyed any such |
| 1:30.6 | claims to historical certainty. It's appropriately titled, History Disrupted |
| 1:36.8 | how social media and the World Wide Web have changed the past. And its author is Jason Steinhauer, a global fellow at the Wilson Center, |
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