000			a
999			_c34665 _d34665
008			250915b xxu||||| |||| 00| 0 eng d
020			_a9780226451954
082			_a302.231 _bLIU
100			_aLiu, Alan
245			_aFriending the past : the sense of history in the digital age
260			_bUniversity of Chicago Press, _c2018 _aLondon :
300			_axiii, 318 p. ; _bill., _c23 cm.
365			_b35.00 _c$ _d89.00
504			_aIncludes bibliographical references and index.
520			_aCan 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.
650			_aTechnology
650			_aScience and Nature
650			_aDigital media Social aspects
650			_aInformation society
650			_aDigital Humanities
650			_aCommunication Technological innovations Social aspects
942			_2ddc _cBK