Did you know that a quarter to a third of the Internet has disappeared already? What does it mean to have our digital selves be removed? What does it mean to be "you?"
"The amount of sources available to us from the past is extremely limited and often preserves the voices of the rich, powerful, or otherwise "important.""
This reminded me of a quote from Braveheart: "History is written by those who have hanged heroes".
It is though. It irks me to no end. In the same battle that a king would have won, there were the many stories of you and me, clambering over rocks, trying to get the best shot. That enough of us managed to do something right meant the king had their way. But I suppose unfortunately it is the way of these things.
At one point, I was naive enough to think that there was a place in the world for a "Wikipedia of the ordinary" – an encyclopaediea about each of our parents and grand-parents, to create a human family tree and show that ordinary in numbers was extraordinary. The problem is that, the ordinary, the you and the me, they want to only read about the "extraordinary" in the singular.
Wikipedia of the ordinary would be amazing. I fear the rabbit holes I would fall down with that one would be endless, though..
While I have also gravitated towards the stories of the extraordinary, the older I get, the more I realise that there is not one world, but several - viewed through different lenses over a vast number of different segments; class segments, race segments, age segments, gender segments - the list goes on. So many ways to see the world, so many different ways to tell the same story.
And in that mess of stories, I find myself gravitating toward the ordinary segment more and more.
What a great piece!
"The amount of sources available to us from the past is extremely limited and often preserves the voices of the rich, powerful, or otherwise "important.""
This reminded me of a quote from Braveheart: "History is written by those who have hanged heroes".
It is though. It irks me to no end. In the same battle that a king would have won, there were the many stories of you and me, clambering over rocks, trying to get the best shot. That enough of us managed to do something right meant the king had their way. But I suppose unfortunately it is the way of these things.
At one point, I was naive enough to think that there was a place in the world for a "Wikipedia of the ordinary" – an encyclopaediea about each of our parents and grand-parents, to create a human family tree and show that ordinary in numbers was extraordinary. The problem is that, the ordinary, the you and the me, they want to only read about the "extraordinary" in the singular.
Wikipedia of the ordinary would be amazing. I fear the rabbit holes I would fall down with that one would be endless, though..
While I have also gravitated towards the stories of the extraordinary, the older I get, the more I realise that there is not one world, but several - viewed through different lenses over a vast number of different segments; class segments, race segments, age segments, gender segments - the list goes on. So many ways to see the world, so many different ways to tell the same story.
And in that mess of stories, I find myself gravitating toward the ordinary segment more and more.