Friending the Past

The Sense of History in the Digital Age

Alan Liu

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English

Chicago University Press
27 November 2018

Literature: history & criticism; Society & Social Sciences; Media studies; History of science

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.

By: Alan Liu
Imprint: Chicago University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
ISBN: 9780226451954
ISBN 10: 022645195X
Pages: 336
Publication Date: 27 November 2018
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

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.

Reviews for Friending the Past: The Sense of History in the Digital Age

"""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 University"