You're History

Because technology and new media is so, well, new, it was interesting for me that it was brought up in the same discussion as history. When we think of history, we think of textbooks, dates and times, and mainly old things. But as Damian said in class, we are history. This exact moment is history.

As Benneton says, the further away from an event we are the more we can understand it. This statement really made me stop and think. The more I thought about it, the more sense it made to me. When an event happens, immediately people jump to conclusions about what happened, why it happened and who was involved. When we take a moment and step back and look at the event as a whole from afar, we may stumble across certain things that were not clear at the time.

With new media and the advanced technology we have today, we can record history like never before. Who knows, this blog may even be considered history in a few years. No longer do we need to rely solely on a textbook to tell us what counts as history and what does not. Textbooks pick and chose from millions of event in the past to tell people about. Now, we are able to record what we want to record and study what we want to study. We are not limited to others dictating to us what happened and how it happened. We can decide for ourselves what happened and how we feel about it.

As Terry Eagleton said, to live humanly is to constantly project oneself forward. So what is happening at this very moment is history. We must constantly project ourselves forward and look to the future. Like technology, if a new system or idea has just come out, it is already outdated, it is history. By the time a new item is released, there is already a different item being created that will surpass it in a short time.