Melissa

We’ve all experienced the sensation- watching an old film, maybe a grainy 1970′s horror movie. A vulnerable woman is trapped in her home by a crazed killer who has cut the telephone cord, rendering her helpless. How will she escape? What will she do?

It is difficult to watch a scene such as this through a modern lens and disassociate from the technological comforts we are used to in 2012. A scene such as this would never fly today. Her cell phone would still work. Paul Young’s chapter “Media On Display: A Telegraphic History of Early American Cinema” discusses the quite meta concept of not only considering the relationship between two types of media, but also depictions of one form of multimedia within the another. Young explores within this analysis the sociohistorical subtext which can be interpreted within these relationships- a subtext which reveals much about how we have historically interacted with new forms of media, and furthermore, the ways in which different types of media play off of one another.

Young analyzes images of the telegraph in early American cinema, and he explains early on why he has chosen the telegraph over the telephone. The telegraph, Young explains, was a “people’s medium” from early on. Different from the telephone, which was still a largely upper class technology at the time, the telegraph communicated ideas across society rather than private conversations between two individuals. Images of the telegraph in early cinema, as Young asserts, play the role of “the public medium’s public medium”, often mirroring early audiences’ democratic and symbiotic relationship with films and the art of filmgoing itself.

I chose this article  from our selection because early American film is definitely a research interest of mine, and the title of this chapter alone indicated a fresh take on cinema history. Young’s article was indeed teeming with cultural analysis of which one could spend pages discussing. I particularly enjoyed his discussion of how early forms of media purported to democratize society while in fact serving to  further enforce class structure. However, for the purposes of this blog, and this class, I will focus on the image below:

This screenshot from the end of Edwin S. Porter’s 1903 film The Great Train Robbery is an iconic one. In his article, Young discusses this image, which perhaps achieved its notorious status because it was one of the earliest cinematic instances of an actor breaking character, thus breaking the 4th wall, communicating directly with the audience, and bringing to light the relationship between technology and the audiences consuming it. As a self proclaimed amateur film historian, this got me thinking. In what ways did this image foreshadow the ways in which twentieth century audiences would subsequently interact with film? Does this relationship reemerge in the ways we’ve interacted with newer technologies in recent decades?

I am a few weeks away from my 29th birthday, and I recognize a sort of generational gap between myself and those even five years younger than me. I remember doing school research before the internet. I remember when I couldn’t email my friends, and when, if I wanted to talk to them, I had to call them. I remember what it was like to hear a new song on the radio, love it, and need to do serious detective work if I wanted to hear it again or even know what it was. I remember living, functionally and happily, before we depended so heavily on all this stuff. And because of this, the internet will always vaguely seem like uncharted territory to me, and the impact its had upon our lives will forever be mildly confusing- even though I’ve now had an email address for more years of my life than I hadn’t.

I’ve little to contribute as far as what it means to be a historian in the digital age. I have always been a history buff, but I have rarely had my pulse on changing technology. I mean, up until 2 months ago I was still using a flip phone, and my television set has a built-in VHS player, because it’s the the one I’ve had since college and it works so I see no reason to replace it. I did, however, keep an internet journal, approximately between the ages of 17 and 20. Which means that before the term “social media” entered our lexicon, I was plastering my opinions and feelings (and maybe even the cutest picture of myself I could find just in case that boy happened to see it) all over the interweb. So, I guess I’m more of a renegade than I thought. You would have to pay me a million dollars to expose this journal here. I was an angsty kid, and it is humiliating. Though often painful to read, it is amusing nonetheless and I have never deleted it from the web. I refer back to it from time to time, when I need a little perspective or a hearty laugh or am simply curious about what I was doing ten years ago today. The latter impulse sent me scrolling back through my archive this past September 11th, knowing I had very likely blogged on September 11th, 2001. Indeed I had. I was 18 years old, and three weeks into my freshman year of college in Philadelphia. I didn’t have a cell phone yet, and was completely reliant on my land line. Being from New York, it took several hours before I was able to reach my parents and talk to them about what was happening. I was scared and confused. Here is an excerpt of my entry:

“I was in the shower..and I swear, at that very moment, anticipating going home in 10 days, and how beautiful Central Park will be on the 1st day of fall…it’s frightening me a great deal, how my dad says this is worse than Pearl Harbor.. and this very well could mean a war.. I can’t stop thinking about all the people who’s lives have been irreversibly affected by this. I’m just so terrified about what might happen..“

As I was reading this, I began for the first time to view my own internet journal of a decade earlier through the lens of a public historian. The internet itself is such a richly layered artifact, and truly democratic one at that. We- as in everyone who uses the internet- have created this artifact (a truth particularly relevant at this moment due to the threat of SOPA, though this is a topic for another blog post entirely). I’ve often espoused the manner in which the ability to cultivate an internet personality has exposed both the insecurities and narcissism inherent of the human condition, but from a less jaded viewpoint, it has seemingly given us a very powerful forum in which to write our own narrative, frequently without realizing we are doing so. Sure, much of this narrative includes the sort of senseless drivel abound on facebook and twitter, of which I am certainly guilty. But back to the topic at hand, when it comes to a major life-changing world event such as September 11th, it is certainly possible to wade through the drivel and see the internet as the incredible resource it is. If I had left my permanent footprint on the web, encapsulating both my own unique perspective of that horrific day as well as the sorts of common feelings and emotions shared by much of the country, hadn’t many thousands of others likely done the same? I began thinking about how, as a public historian in particular, this perspective lends itself to the unique ability to incorporate everyone’s history- not just the tales of the big guys. I then began brainstorming a sort of digitial exhibit which featured blog posts and online journal entries from that fateful day. I quickly got distracted by another fleeting impulse, as I am wont to do, and forgot the entire tangent. But it’s a good idea, yes? Probably not anything new or revelatory, and maybe it’s an idea someone out there has actually already put into practice, but I think it’s certainly worth mulling over in light of this class. As historians, should we and can we see the internet itself as one giant artifact? And what does this mean for future generations?