I volunteer as a costumed interpreter at a living history* museum. The 1865 Prince of Wales woodstove in the kitchen was roaring so it became the center of attention:
Ohhh. What is that big thing?
Why is it so big? Seven burners!
What did they burn?
These are but a sampling of the most common questions asked by adult Canadians. I repeatedly explained that wood was indeed what was burned in a woodstove and that it was the only source of heat, hot water and cooked food so it needed to be big. The technologies of the past are, I have discovered, as elusive and confusing to people as emerging present day ones can be.
Jump back two days earlier in my week to a meeting of bleeding edge “digital media” academics. At this meeting I represent a lowly field worker as I have no phD and I am far more obsessed and immersed in digital media than I am in academic ladder-climbing and grant-writing. The purpose of this meeting is a frank discussion of all of our work and interests. In the midst of a long and terribly post-structuralist debate about the voidness of the term “literacy” I interject rudely with what I am interested in. I want to know why digital media academics assume their own technological literacy even though they are, in my experience, merely interlopers. For example, only one other person in the room (my hero!), uses Twitter. To quote one academic attendee: Did you say Titter?
I volunteer at Victorian museums because I am, through and through, an historian. The impossibility of a thorough and final analysis of life in the past drives me Sisypheanly. Thus my singular conclusion is that time, history and technology are neither linear nor progressive but rather recursively relational and contextual. So there.
The visitors to the museum today were trying to understand. They were eager to have me explain the gigantic wood stove. But we, interpreter and visitor alike, can be excused for never really knowing life with that technology: we can’t travel in time.
The digital media academics were not interested in my critical point of view. My comment was ignored (except by my heroic ally). But what’s worse is they don’t need to time travel. They have the ability to really get digital media, or at least, meet with digital media workers as peers with different but not inferior expertise and be hungry to build relationships with them across social hierarchies.
The situation seems utterly hopeless until I remember the people who do navigate both academic and digital technology hierarchies with rigorous and irreverent aplomb. For example: me!
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