
Friending the Past
The Sense of History in the Digital Age
Alan Liu(Author)
University of Chicago Press
Published on 10. November 2018
Book
Paperback/Softback
336 pages
978-0-226-45195-4 (ISBN)
Description
Can today's society, increasingly captivated by a constant flow of information, share a sense of history? How did our media-making forebears balance the tension between the present and the absent, the individual and the collective, the static and the dynamic-and how do our current digital networks disrupt these same balances? Can our social media, with its fleeting nature, even be considered social at all?
In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history-such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism-and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today's JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry.
Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive "network archaeologies" can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.
In Friending the Past, Alan Liu proposes fresh answers to these innovative questions of connection. He explores how we can learn from the relationship between past societies whose media forms fostered a communal and self-aware sense of history-such as prehistorical oral societies with robust storytelling cultures, or the great print works of nineteenth-century historicism-and our own instantaneous present. He concludes with a surprising look at how the sense of history exemplified in today's JavaScript timelines compares to the temporality found in Romantic poetry.
Interlaced among these inquiries, Liu shows how extensive "network archaeologies" can be constructed as novel ways of thinking about our affiliations with time and with each other. These conceptual architectures of period and age are also always media structures, scaffolded with the outlines of what we mean by history. Thinking about our own time, Liu wonders if the digital, networked future can sustain a similar sense of history.
Reviews / Votes
"Friending the Past is argued with Alan Liu's characteristic power, and exhibits the high level of creative abstraction that I think of as the signature asset of Romanticists, including Liu. This book is thoughtfully engaged with a breadth of research and is a brilliant observation of our digital milieu, its overarching logics, and underlying conditions."--Lisa Gitelman, New York UniversityMore details
Language
English
Place of publication
Chicago
United States
Publishing group
The University of Chicago Press
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
49 halftones
Dimensions
Height: 228 mm
Width: 151 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
416 gr
ISBN-13
978-0-226-45195-4 (9780226451954)
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Schweitzer Classification
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E-Book
11/2018
1st Edition
University of Chicago Press
from
€29.40
Available for download
Person
Alan Liu is Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. His previous books include Wordsworth: The Sense of History, and two books published by the University of Chicago Press, The Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information and Local Transcendence: Essays on Postmodern Historicism and the Database.