China Social Science Review

No.1, 2021

 

Reconceptualizing the Order of Western History Writing from the Perspective of Media Technology

(Abstract)

 

Gu Xiaowei

 

Based on the insight that “the medium is the message,” history writing is an extension of the senses of memory in which media technology plays a decisive role. When the content of history writing is presented through different media including speech, oracle bones, stone tablets, bamboo slips, parchment, manuscripts, printed books, computers and cell phones, its order is bound to change dramatically. For classical historiography in the age of oral culture, the order of history writing was controlled by a system shared by an auditory community that moved from “hearing” to “hearing,” in which oral expression and its eloquent rhetoric were highlighted as a necessary skill; in the modern historiography of the print culture, reading and writing associated with the visual sense replaced recitation, and the order of history writing became controlled by a system shared by a visual community that moved from “looking” to “looking”, in which written expression and its rational logic became a skill requiring intensive training. In the contemporary historiography of the cyber culture, the “algorithms” of AI and digital reading terminals will become the final arbiter of the history writing order, and in the change from “print people” to “intelligence people,” algorithms and historians will go hand in hand or slowly merge as the ecology of history writing becomes “retribalized” in cyberspace. The intervention of AI does not mean the demise of the community of historians. The human brain is always ahead of the computer, and as long as we maintain a quick and sound mind, we will be able to meet challenges and continue to bring boundless vitality to the writing of history.