When History Is Not History

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• When History Is Not History
• Brian Steele (bio)

Jason Steinhauer, History, Disrupted: How Social Media and the World Wide Web Have Changed the Past. Cham, Switzerland: Springer Nature, 2022. vii + 160pp. Notes and index.

It’s possible to argue that more history is more widely available than ever before in human… well, history, but Jason Steinhauer thinks that most of it isn’t, strictly speaking, history at all; and he makes a disturbingly cogent case that the internet has the potential to render—indeed already is rendering—history proper altogether obsolete. He is particularly concerned to distinguish “professional” history—which has, he says, intrinsic value—from what he labels “e-history,” the historically oriented podcasts, tweets, short-form videos, and blog posts that seem to have cornered the history market on what Steinhauer calls, somewhat awkwardly (if precisely), the “Social Web,” which more and more of us tend to entrust with our questions about the past. Steinhauer is, in his way, foretelling a new “End of History,” and it’s not the Fukuyama kind.

The internet has made professional/academic scholarship more efficient in multiple ways, and the digital humanities have made the tools and products of academic research more widely accessible: the proliferation of digitized archives, online versions of academic journals and books, and recorded lectures, conferences, conversations, and courses has surely facilitated historical scholarship, and, presumably, historical understanding. But Steinhauer wants to distinguish this widespread availability of professional history from the explosion and increasing dominance of “e-history”: “discrete media products that package an element, or elements, of the past for consumption on the social Web and which try to leverage the social Web in order to gain visibility” (p. 1).

In a nutshell, Steinhauer’s ultimate argument is this: “the values that underpin the professional discipline of history are at odds with the values that underpin the social Web” (p. 9). Professional history, he writes, is an “expertcentric, always-evolving intellectual pursuit that is time-consuming and rests on its intrinsic value. The social Web is a user-centric, data-driven commercial enterprise that is instantly gratifying and privileges extrinsic value” (p. 9). And here is the key insight: insofar as history is wrenched into the platforms of [End Page 278] the social web, its goals, irrespective of the intentions of the historians themselves, necessarily become transmuted to fit, and ultimately to serve, those of the platforms themselves. The more that happens, Steinhauer fears, the more “e-history” will become “a proxy for all history” (p. 7).

Marshall McLuhan lurks in the background (though he only appears in one endnote). Indeed, Steinhauer’s basic insight is that the “social Web” (the medium) subordinates or transforms history (the message) to fit its own values and priorities. Much as Twitter “gamifies” communication, as C. Thi Nguyen has demonstrated, thus impoverishing the rich goals we have for it (understanding, deliberation, truth-seeking), reducing it to a search for the rewards Twitter offers (clicks, likes, retweets), rewards often at odds with those original goals, so professional historians plying their trade on the social web will begin to practice e-history. Otherwise, they will be ignored.¹ Professional history can obviously live on the web, in other words, but it cannot capture much attention, which is the coin of the realm of e-history and its platforms. Professional history just won’t generate clicks and retweets. By contrast, the stuff that does is not really doing what professional historians are trying to do. Which begs the question: What are professional historians trying to do? What is professional history against which Steinhauer reads e-history?

Steinhauer suggests, first, that professional history is, as all readers of this journal know, time-consuming, and thus privileges the expertise that comes from deep immersion in sources and worlds of the past. This long marination is the very thing that allows professional historians to contextualize events and arguments and helps us understand the past as something alien to us, orienting us to it by challenging our shibboleths, or at least teaching us to recognize them as themselves historically situated. Time-soaked professional history, in other words, produces historical understanding. And historical understanding often generates, in turn, both...