History and Home
Thursday, May 19th, 2005 at 12:35 pm | Category: Uncategorized
I was struck by a funny thought the other night as I was attending my girlfriend’s kindergarden class’ muical program entitled E-I-E-I, Oops! (For the record: my girlfriend is the teacher not one of the students). It was a crowded room and full of proud, excited, bored and tired parents…and about 200 cameras: digital cameras, video cameras, film cameras, etc.. The most intriguing was the video cameras. Some people documented the whole event on video camera, even when their childern were doing nothing, and even after the children left the stage. That is an hour of footage that may never be watched again, that only a very small number of people would find to be significant.
It is interesting how we have all this history that surrounds us, history that we capture and encapsulate in our desired medium, and we then create a presentation for that history, or a repository for. We grab and image, a video clip, a sound and a bit of memory and synthesize these together to make fuller more rich memory. I’ll bet that most of our memory about certain times are heavily influenced by the medium that we used to capture it, that I wonder if we had more complete history if we would remember a clearer picture of the time. Also, does our memory lie to us because of a decieving image from that media? I learned a little about the uncertainty of history in college (especially in philosophy classes) and knowing my own poor memory, I see more clearly how experience effects this knowledge of memory…
Another question is this: Is the story more important and meaningful than the raw, hard facts. Does partially fictionalized story have the possibility of speaking more truth than cold hard facts?
I ran across more history recently, history from my past, my home. It is so cool to recount the past through the eyes and words of a whole group of people. That’s what makes Wiki so cool, but that is another post.