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The forum is starting to get flooded...
Can we at least limit the number of posts on "compare your life in 2003 to 2013"? Yeah, you can interpret it as a history topic...except that it isn't.
Leaving aside the ridiculous proposals like the one in quotes, I think pop culture is a history topic...though as has been suggested a sub-forum sounds like a good idea to me.
I don't spend much time with Sixties postings, as an example, that simply say I loved x singer, y band, z TV show, this skirt, those shoes, etc.
Unless the poster puts those remembered preferences into a life, a town, a social class, etc. of the Sixties...and talks about whether others in his/her town or city were doing the same or different, it doesn't hold too much interest for me. On the other hand, with these bits of nostalgia put into a context we are certainly into history, and definitely into more interesting postings, IMO.
I think the History forum would be better divided into chronological eras.
It's just a mash of everything now, making it difficult to locate topics.
I'd guesstimate half of posts are about the WW2 years in some facet.
I agree with the OP. What was life like in 1960 is not the same asking, "What was the life of dirt-poor farmers like in the Texas Hill Country in 1960?" My life growing up in a small town outside of Pittsburgh in 1960 was very different from someone growing up on a dirt-poor farm in the Texas Hill Country in 1960.
Everyone's situation is unique and always has been. Any question like this must be more specific to be answered with any value. For example, someone might ask, what was it like growing up in a West Virginia coal company town in the 1930s? or the 1950s? or the 1970s?
I think that even the general question gets a pass, if only the respondents would make their postings specific to their life situations in the era being discussed.
We are inundated by too many teenyboppers who believe civilization began with the invention of the video game and the flush toilet.
i'm a teenybopper who loves me some justin beiber, ya hear!! ya rascal!! hehe.
well seriously pop culture shapes our understanding of life in an age where it is constantly around us in every form of media. it also can destroy a business (if you have a bad rating on yelp, your restaurant will be out of business - or that dunkin donuts rat in new york city a few days ago) or make one with positive reviews. who really buys stuff today without checking prices online and reading reviews? i am talking about the people who can and do use computers. it is affecting our lives in a serious way. also, google maps and accuweather. i can't live without that. i use it so much. i can go on.
Yeah, its about comparing our 2014 phones to our 2004 phones.
I realize that you're predictably trying to be flip here. And yet.
The difference between a phone from 2004 and a phone from 2014 is an enormous chasm. What's more, it's pretty much manifest that smartphones have already disrupted a large number of patterns in how people work, travel, shop, and document the world around them. Heck, take your average iPhone and see how many industries it has disrupted, from cameras to music, and even the maker of road maps and GPS systems. Look at how we're communicating beyond the act of dialing a number. Look at the generational shift in how people interact. It is affecting how we live. Jeez, all you have to do is look at the Arab Spring and see how people used new mobile technology to organize and run circles around the authorities. Think of how much compelling and influential news footage was shot on someone's Android or iPhone, footage that couldn't have possibly been shot in 2004. So, sure, the development of mobiles phones aren't interesting to someone who wants to delve in excruciating detail on the Battle of Anzio, but in many ways it's just as important.
And that, my friend, is history in action. So thanks for actually making my point for me.
What you cite here does indeed sound worthwhile; the problem is that the inundation the OP is talking about includes discussion of cultural gradations from only a few years apart, an almost insignificant historical time frame. Further, the focus seems not to center much on historical themes as pop cultural ones.
I understand your point. But let's talk about how cultural shifts utterly changed the body politic between 1955 and 1965. Two completely, utterly different periods separated by only ten years. Think that the equivalent of the Vietnam War protests would have happened in 1958? No way.
Or consider how the cultural underpinnings of the West in the aftermath of the First World War essentially created the culture that made the appeasement policy towards Hitler possible in the late 1930s. Even now, when I discuss the 1980s with my rather politically-aware daughter, it's interesting how alien it all is to her.
So I guess what I'm saying is that culture, pop or otherwise, is not the cute little veneer that adds human interest and flavor to history's great events. It is not some sideshow. Instead, it has a profound influence on history's events. Hard to believe that anyone would argue otherwise.
I realize that you're predictably trying to be flip here. And yet.
The difference between a phone from 2004 and a phone from 2014 is an enormous chasm.
That must be why if you enter any history class across the nation, they will be talking about the last decade's advances in portable telephones.
Let us focus on what is actually the central question in all this. How old do events need to be before they assume the aspect "history?" We could take the entirely indiscriminate approach and rule that this sentence is history the moment I complete it. That leaves us with a definition so broad that it renders impractical the notion of teaching history in schools, the immediacy and personal relevance of the present would always overwhelm the past. So, logically some pragmatism must be involved, we must designate an artificial line where on one side lies history and on the other, current events.
If we took a poll, I'm confident that voting would break down along age lines, with younger participants supporting a view which includes the most recent years of their own lives, and older participants placing the line much further back. Regardless of what sort of an answer the poll produced, this would still represent opinion, there is no absolute answer here, we will each have our appropriate ranges in mind.
I would peg it at twenty five years and my support for that idea is based on my experiences in perceptions. I have lived through a great deal of what now appears in history books, but of course did not when I was in school. The perspective which I had while the events were taking place, and the perspective I ultimately developed after being divorced from the immediate associated emotions, and learning more about the specific truths involved, were very different. In all cases the perspective developed later has proven to be the superior one.
Further, what is true for me personally is also true for the writing of history in general. The first accounts to appear typically are the most extreme, either completely negative or 100 % positive. The reason for this is that they are typically being written by people who had been participants in the events and had a personal stake in the outcome. The second wave, usually ten years later, brings the correctives and they typically over correct, swinging the pendulum to the opposite side. Finally, twenty to twenty five years after the events, the reflective consensus works appear where the goal is no longer winning, it is presenting what happened as factually as is possible.
Thus, no matter how important cell phone development may have been in the last ten years, now isn't the time to write the history of them, at least not if your goal is "The meaning of cell phone technology on society." In another ten or 15 years you will have a different outlook and would be writing a better, larger perspective book.
That must be why if you enter any history class across the nation, they will be talking about the last decade's advances in portable telephones.
Let us focus on what is actually the central question in all this. How old do events need to be before they assume the aspect "history?" We could take the entirely indiscriminate approach and rule that this sentence is history the moment I complete it. That leaves us with a definition so broad that it renders impractical the notion of teaching history in schools, the immediacy and personal relevance of the present would always overwhelm the past. So, logically some pragmatism must be involved, we must designate an artificial line where on one side lies history and on the other, current events.
If we took a poll, I'm confident that voting would break down along age lines, with younger participants supporting a view which includes the most recent years of their own lives, and older participants placing the line much further back. Regardless of what sort of an answer the poll produced, this would still represent opinion, there is no absolute answer here, we will each have our appropriate ranges in mind.
I would peg it at twenty five years and my support for that idea is based on my experiences in perceptions. I have lived through a great deal of what now appears in history books, but of course did not when I was in school. The perspective which I had while the events were taking place, and the perspective I ultimately developed after being divorced from the immediate associated emotions, and learning more about the specific truths involved, were very different. In all cases the perspective developed later has proven to be the superior one.
Further, what is true for me personally is also true for the writing of history in general. The first accounts to appear typically are the most extreme, either completely negative or 100 % positive. The reason for this is that they are typically being written by people who had been participants in the events and had a personal stake in the outcome. The second wave, usually ten years later, brings the correctives and they typically over correct, swinging the pendulum to the opposite side. Finally, twenty to twenty five years after the events, the reflective consensus works appear where the goal is no longer winning, it is presenting what happened as factually as is possible.
Thus, no matter how important cell phone development may have been in the last ten years, now isn't the time to write the history of them, at least not if your goal is "The meaning of cell phone technology on society." In another ten or 15 years you will have a different perspective and would be writing a better, larger perspective book.
Nice bit of jujitsu to totally ignore the rest of my argument. I'm fifty-one, thanks, not a college freshman. And world events have often depended greatly on such things that you seem sniff at and call trivial. I mean, the world's financial structure tottered in the late 1990s because respected investment houses were shoving billions into dotcoms that had zero chance in hell of ever turning a profit. I mean, given the titanic shifts in society and the economy that the internet has wrought in less than twenty-five years, are you seriously suggesting that no one should have written a serious history before now? Please tell me that you don't really believe that.
What's more, one really doesn't have to be much of a historian to look at the patterns of history and view current events as a new manifestation of it. Hey, as the adage goes, history doesn't repeat itself. But it quite often rhymes. If we use the same discussion of the Internet that I mentioned earlier, we will find much of the same big picture issues come to the fore as the advent of television, radio, and the printing press. There is too much at stake for some fusty academic to stand up and shout, "Wait! Wait! It hasn't been twenty-five years yet!"
Even now, we're watching China frantically turn itself into the most epic bubble of our age. If you actually sat back and waited twenty-five years before looking at the current events in that country, you might be in a world of hurt. Can anybody say "Dutch tulip craze" in Mandarin?
Current events is merely history in the making, not something that we wait a quarter century to define. And even an extreme interpretation of events is better than none at all. Our understanding of history, even if it only took place five years ago, is often critical. The notion that we're just supposed to sit around and wait a generation before we analyze an event strikes me as ridiculous, particularly when one considers how fast events move in today's world.
Second, let's not be pedantic and scoff at the importance of popular culture, because that is the best possible measuring stick there is to understand the attitudes of a society. In fact let me out-pedantic you and toss out the word Zeitgeist. Pop culture effectively captures that. Sorry that so many seem to miss the point.
Nice bit of jujitsu to totally ignore the rest of my argument. I'm fifty-one, thanks, not a college freshman..
Gonna ignore this one as well, you come across as too hostile in my estimation.
I offered my ideas and my reasons for those concepts. I acknowledged that others will see it differently. As noted, pragmatism demands that a line be drawn somewhere and I do not see how your history without walls approach helps in deciding where that line should be.
Gonna ignore this one as well, you come across as too hostile in my estimation.
I offered my ideas and my reasons for those concepts. I acknowledged that others will see it differently. As noted, pragmatism demands that a line be drawn somewhere and I do not see that your limitless approach helps in deciding where that line should be.
I'm not being hostile. I'm just pointing out the flaws in your post in the interest of spirited debate. In fact, given the dismissive tone of your previous post, I felt I was going rather easy on you.
Back to your point. You keep bandying about the word pragmatism. Yet pragmatism actually demands the opposite of what you advocate. The world is continuously reinventing itself. I mean, let's flip the calendar back to 1989. The Soviet Union was still intact. China was emerging. The conventional distribution channels of business were still intact. People still got most of their news from newspapers and CNN. Nobody had mobile phones. The Internet was essentially a local area network at a science lab. What if we waited until now to understand everything that happened in 1989 or even 2001?
Sitting back and waiting a generation to analyze events and give them a historical context is the exact opposite of pragmatic. I mean, sure, if you want to analyze some obscure Civil War battle, then what's 150 years? But if you are going to wait twenty-five years to assign meaning to events that took place five, ten, or fifteen years ago, then you could be inviting catastrophe.
Back to the original point of all this. Culture, pop and otherwise, can matter a great deal in determining the course of history, as much as which general is appointed to lead which army in which war. People who don't understand this point don't really understand history at all. Sure, they might be able to name the Confederate commander in the battle of Pea Ridge. But beyond winning a trivia challenge, that really strips history of its true and lively purpose.
Last edited by cpg35223; 04-08-2014 at 06:09 PM..
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