HIS 218: Intro. to Digital History: Writing Response to Rosenzweig's introduction to Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Presenting, and Preserving the Past  

Roy Rosenzweig's introduction highlights how much thinking about the Web has remained the same over the decades. In 1997, as Daniel Cohen points out in his chapter, "When the Web Was Young," Netscape, an early dominant search engine, was about to be overtaken by Microsoft Explorer. About that same time, I was taking a course, History of Print, in which the class considered among other things what effect the Web would have on print culture, education, orality, the future of books, commerce, etc. I guessed that there would be fragmentation ("balkanization" of the web as Rosenzweig more accurately calls it). My professor railed at the Walt Disney Corporation, anticipating, and actually already experiencing, broad copyright infringement,  claiming its copyrights into perpetuity throughout the universe.   

Many of these concerns remain contemporary. We are still reaching back to Gertrude Gimmelfarb's A Neo-Luddite Reflects on the Internet(1996), because her concerns are still relevant each time technological innovations cause us to shift and change whether we want to or not. Among the articles Rosenzweig mentions, I also wanted to see Nicholas Carr's Is Google Making Us Stupid? (2008). The point is, from time to time, the Web's vastness, ubiquity and" irrepressibleness" requires an assessment, and each time a writer, in this case a historian, takes the time to assess, contemporary issues only make sense if we first go back to the beginning to feel the still building momentum.

Rosenzweig writes, “Prophets of hypertext have repeatedly promised a new, richer reading experience, but critics have instead seen the digital environment as engendering the death of reading as we know it. Sven Birkerts has expressed the most profound sense of loss in Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age.” There is also a later take on the issue I like, “Literacy Debate: Online RU Really Reading” a New York Times article by Motoko Rich (2008). Both Birkerts, Rich and Carr lament alleged damage the Web is doing to our ability to focus and comprehend, and I would add what it really means to learn. At the same time I was taking The History of Print,  Alberto Manguel’s A History of Reading was a bestseller. Again, the themes Rosenzweig discusses are part of the permanent ethical concerns surrounding the information age.

I am more concerned with the social and political implications of web development. Is greater global access being addressed? Can we combat misinformation,  the “dangers” Rosenzweig alludes to? How long before information becomes even more codified with paywalls as mega conglomerates gobble up useful information citizens need to make decisions about their futures.