For the past two decades, I have been working in higher education and observing how the Internet, and the digital revolution more generally, has transformed my profession (History).
While there have been many beneficial developments, I would argue that the biggest impact that the Internet has had on my profession is to undermine it.
How has it done that? It has done that in two ways: by making historical information instantly available and by transforming how people communicate.
When I was an undergraduate in the 1980s, History Departments were places where you could gain access to knowledge that otherwise wasn’t easy to find and where you could learn (or improve your ability) to communicate through long-form writing.
Through the curated presentation of information in-class lectures and readings (information that was not otherwise easily available), you could develop knowledge that others did not possess, and could not easily obtain.
And through the writing of research papers for classes, or a final-year thesis, you could develop the ability to produce long-form writings.
The Internet changed all this. Now all manner of historical information is a click away, and shorter, more visual, and more colloquial forms of communication dominate.
That is a revolutionary transformation, and just as there are winners and losers in every revolution, the History profession has found itself on the losing side of this revolution, a fact that is demonstrated in such phenomena as the declining number of majors and graduate students, and diminishing job prospects.
What has been particularly surprising to me, however, is that I don’t find people talking about this and trying to do something to adapt to the changes that are taking place. Instead, it is more common to find people in higher education diving deeper into their own irrelevance as the world forges ahead.
We can find, for instance, countless university administrators around the globe urging professors to produce and publish ever more long-form writings to improve university rankings (i.e., more publications = higher rankings) at a time when fewer and fewer people actually read any of those publications.
Meanwhile, at the undergraduate level, the capstone achievement in fields like History continues to be the production of long-form writing (following the Chicago Manual of Style), at a time when fewer and fewer students will actually make use of this skill later in life.
And all of the evidence is right there before our eyes because we now have metrics. We can see exactly how few people read academic publications, and we can see exactly how many fewer students are deciding to major in fields like History.
The core problem (i.e., the issue people don’t talk about) is that we are living through a knowledge revolution that is undermining the historical profession (and other areas of higher education). The way that knowledge is obtained and communicated has changed.
In early-twentieth-century Vietnam, there was a similar knowledge revolution, one that changed the way knowledge was obtained and communicated, and there are many parallels between what happened in that knowledge revolution and the one that is taking place today.
The knowledge revolution in early-twentieth-century Vietnam negatively affected traditionally-trained scholars, people whom I’ll refer to here simply as “Confucian scholars” as many of the texts that they studied were part of the larger “Confucian” tradition.
Before the twentieth century, these Confucian scholars dominated the world of knowledge production in Vietnam. They ran the schools, determined the curriculum, and controlled the system for conferring credentials (the civil service examination system).
Then an alternative way of understanding the world and communicating (Western science and the vernacular language) took hold, and that was the end for the knowledge world of the Confucian scholars.
They lost control of the schools and curriculum, and in 1919, the system for conferring credentials was abolished. Along with these changes, the language that had been employed in the traditional educational system, classical Chinese, was gradually abandoned as well.
As these dramatic changes unfolded, there were some Confucian scholars who sought to adapt to the new knowledge world. There were people, for instance, like traditionally-trained scholar Nguyễn Bá Trác 阮伯卓 who co-founded an influential bi-lingual (later tri-lingual) journal called Southern Breeze (Nam Phong 南風) in 1917 that sought to introduce Western knowledge to readers of both Vietnamese and classical Chinese.
Nguyễn Bá Trác was in charge of the classical Chinese section of Nam Phong and in 1921 he published an essay that was directed at Confucian scholars (nhà Nho) or members of what was then starting to be called “Old learning” (cựu học 舊學). This essay was first published in the classical Chinese section of the journal (對於舊學列先生之獻言, Nam Phong No. 49 (1921): 1-12), but was then subsequently translated into Vietnamese and published in the Vietnamese section (“Mấy lời trung cáo với các bạn nhà Nho,” Nam Phong No. 51 (1921): 190-191).
In this essay, Nguyễn Bá Trác noted that in Japan and China, traditionally-trained scholars had learned new concepts from the West and had transformed their thinking. As a result, he argued, they went from writing poetry and erudite prose to writing about history, philosophy, science, politics, and the arts. This is what Nguyễn Bá Trác wanted to see the traditionally-trained scholars in Vietnam do as well.
At the same time, however, Nguyễn Bá Trác was aware that many scholars would probably not make this transition. Nonetheless, he hoped that such people would at least make the effort to preserve traditional learning by translating into vernacular Vietnamese texts that were originally written in classical Chinese, just as Europeans preserved the learning of the Greeks and Romans.
We can get a sense of how Confucian scholars responded to this call from the writings in the 1950s of a man who translated many works from classical Chinese into modern Vietnamese, Nguyễn Hiến Lê.
Nguyễn Hiến Lê was not a traditionally-trained scholar. Instead, he learned Chinese through his own initiative. In the process, he came to lament how little the previous generation had done to help people like himself learn the knowledge that they had been educated on.
While scholars had literally translated works into Vietnamese, they had not explained them, and without that explanation, Nguyễn Hiến Lê argued, their translations were largely incomprehensible.
So, for instance, Nguyễn Hiến Lê noted that while there were people who had translated Chinese literature, such as Tang poetry, into Vietnamese, they had not written about the Tang Dynasty period itself, its characteristics, or its intellectual and artistic culture.
As a result, Nguyễn Hiến Lê stated that the previous generation had produced so little helpful information that trying to learn about Chinese literature from the extant works in Vietnamese was like trying to learn about France by staring at a statue of Joan of Arc.
The difficulties that Nguyễn Hiến Lê faced in trying to learn traditional knowledge is an indication that few Confucian scholars took up Nguyễn Bá Trác’s call to make traditional knowledge accessible to a new generation.
While this frustrated Nguyễn Hiến Lê, he nonetheless had fond memories of the Confucian scholars of the previous generation, and in particular, he nostalgically wrote about times in his youth when he had visited the countryside where Confucian scholars could be found sitting in the shade of a bamboo grove reciting poetry to each other.
From such an observation, we can get a sense of what many of the Confucian scholars may have done after their world became obsolete – not much. If their families owned land, then they could “retire” to that land and live out their days doing things like reciting poetry in the shade of a bamboo grove. This is apparently what Nguyễn Hiến Lê witnessed as a youngster.
That said, while they may have spent time reciting poetry in bamboo groves, the Confucian scholars of early-twentieth-century Vietnam did not simply fade quietly into oblivion.
In a piece that he wrote on Confucianism in the early 1930s, historian Đào Duy Anh noted that for years there had been problems in the villages of Vietnam between the modernizing members of society and the Confucian scholars who had earlier attained status through their mastery of “Old Learning.”
The gist of the issue was that while the Confucian scholars could see that the world was changing, and that their learning was now obsolete, they did not want to give up their status and position of power in local society. This is what led to the conflicts that Đào Duy Anh mentioned.
As such, we can see that during the knowledge revolution that took place in early-twentieth-century Vietnam, the majority of Confucian scholars responded by doing two things: 1) not changing and 2) fighting to hold on to power.
In recent years I have thought a lot about the knowledge revolution that Vietnam experienced in the early twentieth century and the way that Confucian scholars responded, as I see parallels with the knowledge revolution that the Internet has created and the ways that academics today have responded.
Before we get to that point, however, let’s try to get a sense of what exactly has changed, because I think we tend to forget how recently everything was so different.
I started teaching 20 years ago, in 2001.
It was the same year that Wikipedia was created.
However, when I walked into my first class in August of 2001 to teach a survey of Asian History to 1500, I had probably not heard of Wikipedia, as very few Wikipedia pages had been created yet.
I also didn’t know how to use PowerPoint either, nor did anyone else in my Department. Instead, before each class, I printed out an outline of my lecture on a transparency (a thin plastic sheet) and then projected it onto a screen using an overhead projector.
It was only in the fall of 2002 that I first started to use PowerPoint. I took a different approach than many others later would in that I put very little information on the PowerPoint slides. Instead, I used PowerPoint to project images, and since there were so few images on the Internet at that time, I had to scan images from books.
So, I spent A LOT of time looking for books with images in the university library and scanning those images.
Learning PowerPoint was new to me, but the rest of the experience in the classroom was familiar. However, things started to change rapidly.
After a few years of teaching, I started to notice that students were cutting and pasting information from the Internet, such as from Wikipedia pages. So, I transformed assignments in ways that made it difficult to find information online, thereby forcing students to engage with the materials that the assignments were based on.
Around that same time (~2005), flip phones and text messaging started to become popular, and I remember that this did have a negative effect. There were some students who just couldn’t focus in the classroom and who kept checking their phones.
While that is something that continued to affect students in say the first year of university, in upper-division courses, however, I saw that after about a year, most students were in the habit of putting their phones away for the duration of the class (and then checking them immediately once class ended).
Then just as that adaptation with technology was taking place, the iPhone (2007), social media (Facebook = 2004; Twitter = 2006), and YouTube (2005) emerged.
Then right on the heels of these developments was a global financial crisis (2008).
In the years following the financial crisis of 2008, I watched the number of people majoring in History at my university start to go down by about 20 people a year. In six years, it went from like 200 majors to 80.
This was happening at other universities in the US at that time as well, but it was only not until 2018, when historian Ben Schmidt published the results of his examination of statistics collected by the American Historical Association, that it became clear how widespread and serious the decline in not only History majors was but majors in some other fields in the Humanities as well.
Schmidt attributed this decline largely to the career calculations of students. In the aftermath of the financial crisis, and given how expensive tuition is, Schmidt argued that students were making the practical decision to major in subjects that had a better chance of leading to gainful employment.
A critical point here was that Schmidt felt that students were still interested in majoring in subjects like History, but that they could no longer justify doing so in the current economic setting.
I didn’t completely buy that argument, and I wrote an email to Schmidt in which I pointed out what had happened right before the financial crisis — the emergence of smartphones and social media – and tried to make the point that these developments were changing “something.”
I wasn’t sure exactly what that “something” was, but as more and more “cool stuff” was appearing on Facebook, YouTube, and now Instagram (2010), I felt like young people were shifting away from the text-heavy world of fields like History.
Schmidt wrote back and agreed that these digital developments perhaps played some kind of role, but that his data from interviews primarily pointed to the economic argument.
However, the statistical data Schmidt published showed that the number of majors in text-heavy Humanities fields like History, Religion, and Literature had declined, while the numbers in less text-heavy fields like Music and the Arts had not.
So, if these changes were all about perceived job prospects, then that would mean that students in the 2010s were making the calculation that they had better job prospects by majoring in Music than History. . .
That is hard for me to believe, and I have continued to suspect that the “something” that smartphones and social media are changing plays a critical role in explaining why subjects like History are becoming less attractive.
Let us now look at the present.
The other day I was talking to a couple of young people who are going off to university next year, and neither is interested in majoring in History. I asked them why people like themselves and their peers would not be interested in majoring in that subject.
The initial answer confirmed Schmidt’s argument. It was that “It doesn’t seem like there are good job opportunities.”
However, this was followed by other statements that contradicted Schmidt’s view that students are still interested in History, but that they just do not see it as an economically viable path to take.
To quote, my informants stated that, “Young people are also just not interested in studying History. It’s not like they want to study it but then decide that they can’t get a job. They are just not interested in it in the first place.”
I then asked why young people are not interested in History, and they said, “Too much reading and writing. People our age don’t like reading and writing.”
As a university student in the 1980s, I did not major in History.
The reason why I did not major in History was that I thought there was too much reading and writing involved.
For me, it was not that I did not like reading and writing. I think I may have even had dreams of being a writer. It’s that I thought the readings for History would be difficult and that I wasn’t smart enough to do well.
So, the idea that History is not attractive because it involves a lot of reading makes sense to me. This is related to the “something” that I tried to explain to Ben Schmidt in 2018. As I see it, it’s not just that people don’t want to read, it’s that there are so many attractive alternatives to long-form writings on the Internet as well and that these other forms of communication have become the dominant norm.
Further, while I don’t know what percentage of people traditionally avoided majors that require a lot of reading and writing, my guess is that this percentage has increased since the emergence of the Internet, the smartphone, and social media and that this development, together with the concern for finding a job, explain why fewer people are interested in majoring in text-heavy subjects like History.
After Schmidt’s research came out in 2018, there were a lot of discussions both at universities and online, and one comment that I frequently heard from colleagues was “But History is important. We teach critical thinking!! And that’s important for Democracy.”
Comments like these were being made in 2018, a year into the Trump presidency, and following a wild campaign during which I think it would have been extremely difficult to make the case (as my colleagues wished to think) that History Departments in American universities played a key role in fostering an informed public for a healthy Democracy. . .
More importantly, though, I was also aware that none of my colleagues actually taught critical thinking (nor did/do I). I have seen syllabi dedicated to teaching critical thinking that clearly identify skills in the critical thinking process and then have assignments that enable students to practice those skills.
My colleagues did not do that. However, I understood what they meant when they said that they taught “critical thinking” and that this is important for Democracy.
What they meant was that in their courses they present a “critical” perspective on the past which attempts to show how power operates in societies, and they believe that if students learn to “think” about the world in this way, then things will be ok with Democracy.
Over the past few months, I have been thinking about that reaction that I heard in 2018 because recently there has been a more intense version of that cry of “But we teach critical thinking” coming from academics in places like the US as well as the UK.
What we have seen recently are increasing signs that something called Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) is being promoted by universities (and now companies too), and over the past few months, there has been more public resistance to this development as well.
To grossly simplify a complex topic, the gist is that there are people in universities who have decided that some of the biggest issues facing the societies of places like the US and the UK today are things like systemic racism and that one of the most important tasks of universities is to address such issues, and that this can be at least partially achieved through efforts to diversify the representation of different groups of people in university faculty and student bodies.
This movement has its detractors who refer to the ideas professed by its proponents as Critical Race Theory (CRT), Wokeism, or the Woke ideology/religion (and, yes, I am aware that these terms are not entirely synonymous, but they are close enough for what I’m trying to say here). Further, they argue that while there are real problems in the societies of places like the US and UK, DEI/Wokeism is more of an act of elite posing (or what they call “virtue signaling”) than of on-the-ground work that can actually help disadvantaged people.
I’m not interested here in DEI/Wokeism itself. What I think is important, however, is to think about why this is happening now.
Academics in universities have been writing about race for decades. So why is it that suddenly at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century things like systemic racism have become the hot topic at universities, such that even administrators have felt compelled to implement policies to address such issues?
Have race relations in the world suddenly gotten so horrific that it has become necessary to focus all attention on this issue?
No, that hasn’t happened. So why now?
My sense is that the answer to this question only partially has to do with race (which is not to say that there are no racial inequities in the world – of course, there are). Instead, I would argue that it is connected to the knowledge revolution and the ways in which that revolution is depriving academics at universities of meaning and purpose, not unlike the way that the knowledge revolution in early-twentieth-century Vietnam deprived Confucian scholars of a sense of meaning and purpose.
Like the Confucian scholars of say 1920s Vietnam, that is, in the years following the abolishment of the civil service examination system, academics today are part of a tradition that has long claimed that its knowledge is of key importance to society.
Also like the Confucian scholars of 1920s Vietnam, academics today are living in an age when their cherished knowledge is becoming less relevant for a changing society.
Further, in both societies, it was young people who first turned away from this knowledge. Indeed, a 25-page paper based on the Chicago Manual of Style makes about as much sense to young people today as the 8-legged essay (bát cổ văn 八股文) did to young, Westernizing Vietnamese in the 1920s.
Also like the Confucian scholars of 1920s Vietnam, relatively few academics today are trying to find ways to transform what they do so that it can contribute to the changing world of knowledge and communication.
Finally, also like the Confucian scholars of 1920s Vietnam, academics today are fighting hard to maintain their status and whatever power they might have.
How do you do that when a knowledge revolution is peripheralizing your professional knowledge? You take a higher moral stance. The Confucian scholars of 1920s Vietnam started to argue that their knowledge was part of the “national essence” (quốc túy 國粹) of Vietnam and that while people might no longer need to know how to write an 8-legged essay, they did need to learn the moral knowledge that Confucian scholars possessed.
Similarly, academics in places like the US today argue that they teach the “critical thinking” that can save Democracy and end systemic racism.
Again, it’s fascinating to see the parallels between 1920s Vietnam and the present. In both instances, a knowledge revolution undermined an intellectual elite group, and in both instances, most members of that elite group did two things: 1) not change and 2) fight to hold on to power.
Ultimately, however, the only way to survive a knowledge revolution is to change with it and to try to adapt to the new norms. That is what Nguyễn Bá Trác urged traditionally-trained scholars in Vietnam to do in 1921.
For some people, however, change is too difficult. It was too difficult for many Confucian scholars in 1920s Vietnam, and it’s too difficult for many academics today.
I’m not sure why exactly this is the case, but it seems that when you have members of an intellectual elite group who believe that their knowledge is essential for the betterment of society, it is then very difficult for those people to change their ideas and to do something different, even when their long-term survival depends on it.
This Post Has 7 Comments
Hello, I’m a Ph.D. student, and I’m writing a thesis on French theatre and dramatical criticism in Indochina. I work with manuscripts, newspapers, administrative papers, photos, etc.
I have a pretty solid background in French literature (had my whole higher education in France, BA, MA, then doctorate) so reading heavy texts is not really a problem for me. The problem is, I think, it is the sense of “disconnection” that certain types of reading expose their readers to.
On another side, I wasn’t interested in doing a Ph.D. on Indochina in the first place, as I had been trying to not fall into a stereotype – you come from Vietnam, so you have to do something about Vietnam or Indochina.
But as much as I got involved, I’m getting more interested. I started to question why I had tried to stay away from it. My interpretation was, when I was younger, everything I knew was the single version of History – textbooks always say the same thing, and to not mention the propaganda that wraps all Vietnamese people living in Vietnam. So there was no right for alternative stories, personal memories, etc. It’s boring, fossil and it just ignores the reality of our present days.
My thesis gets me to study everything I hate about the History of my own country, but now with more possibilities for interpretations (is that freedom or critical thinking?). Most importantly, it helps me reconnect with my grandpa, who passed away when I was in high school, my grandpa who fought during two wars, against the French and then the Americans. So I think the importance is about personal re-connecting with the subject we study.
And then reading Michel Foucault was an eye-opening experience for me. I love what you do by establishing a sort of analogy between 1920s Confucian scholars and what we know nowadays as the decline of Humanities studies. Nothing is new, we recognize patterns from history. It taught me to cope with changes and stay calm yet alert. If we consider History stone and Text sacred, we can’t go any further.
I didn’t choose to study History, but it was useful for my thesis (1) and my self-creation (2). And maybe because I come from another discipline (literature), new technologies and their impact didn’t surprise me. The arrival of post offices and mails had created a new literary genre (epistolary novel) pour example. They excite me instead.
The only thing that bothers me now is the massive invasion of Digital Humanities. Yet we have new tools and powerful IA, but it just surpasses me, and the “reading long texts” task is not getting any heavier. I love the fairness, democracy, Covid solution and the “everyone got access to anything,” but there are also big competitions to get funding… Moreover, the tools are getting more powerful than the men and women who use them.
This comment is so long because I really enjoyed your article, and I think I have the same perspective and approach. It was a good reading, thank you Pr. Kelley!
Thanks for the comment!!
One of the problems with writing a post like this one is that a blog on the Internet has a “global” readership, but much of what I wrote reflects my experience in, and knowledge of, a particular corner of the American educational system. But then at the same time, some of the things that I talk about are happening in other places as well. . .
I think the field of History in universities in both Vietnam and the US suffers from being seen as pretty irrelevant for succeeding/living in our current world. And in its current form, it is pretty irrelevant. People today communicate across multiple platforms (desktop, tablet, mobile) that rely heavily on visual communication (imagery, motion graphics, video), but when you get a BA in History the focus is on writing a long paper that is properly formatted and cited. . . Those are two completely different worlds, and the History world does very little to prepare someone for the Internet world.
Meanwhile, one of the ways where the field of History in universities in Vietnam and places like the US differs is in things like the absence of critical theory in Vietnamese historical scholarship. While on the one hand, I think critical theory has reached a dead-end in places like the US, and people today just keep saying things that have already been said a million times before, for places like Vietnam where most historians have not thought about basic critical concepts like how power operates through a discourse and how concepts like “bản sắc văn hóa Việt Nam” are therefore definitely not straight-forward “facts” (Who is defining văn hóa? How? Why?). . . then there is a lot that can still be done and learned, and all of that is interesting.
But, yea, I think many people have a fear of “disconnection.” And if you look at places like the US, then they have good reason to think that way. I used to be the undergraduate advisor, and I remember one time I was helping a new transfer student get started. It was a woman who was in the military, and she had previously studied at another US university. I asked her what kind of history she was interested in and she said “Anything but American history!” When I asked her why she wasn’t interested in US history, she said, “Look, I have to defend this country. If I have to keep hearing about all of the bad things that happened in the past, then I’m going to go crazy.”
I have to admit, she had a point. But personally, I think that if you look at the past in all of its complexity, you end up just understanding that, like the present, it was complex. Critical theory has helped show some of that complexity.
Finally, as for Digital Humanities, 10 years ago I was very excited about it because it looked like this would be a way that academics would break out of the ivory tower and communicate with people in the world (and thereby slow down their slide into obsolescence), but in the years since then I have seen so many scholars create DH projects that just take their already arcane topics and make them even more arcane. . . “This DH project makes a critical intervention into our understanding of the literary culture of Europe in the 1730s by geo-referencing the smudge marks on the bindings of books published between January 1, 1930 and December 31, 1739,” etc.
So, I no longer know what I’m trying to say, but I’m glad to hear that you are on a road of “discovery” and appear to be enjoying it!!
Thanks for your reply!
After reading your article and your comment, I’ve learned more about the US system (and mentality as well).
I also talked about my experiences being educated in French universities and groomed with a classic French methodology.
Maybe because I’m still too young in this specific field of study, but I didn’t see any professor or colleague around me having the same struggle that we are discussing here.
They are just doing researches in French, which is well supported by the state’s funding, and happily communicate their works among themselves as French-speaking people.
Just like the 1920s Confucius scholars? (lol) Once, I shocked my Ph.D. supervisor by saying that Indochina doesn’t exist for me. I mean, nobody cares about it now except people who are paid to study it (like me) or folks who work on it for particular reasons. I still believe in what I said, but my supervisor did really try to convince me otherwise.
But as individuals, we make things our way. I’m not really into communicating my work with big audiences who sometimes look for facts that help consolidate their version of History or just seek entertainment. (I started teaching this semester but in literature classes only).
I’m also not very good at producing long articles for my professors to read, so from time to time, I just stop caring and throw myself into personal and more creative projects.
But I think you’re right with your worry because reality sometimes makes young people believe that they have very limited choices for their job and then their career, and surviving in academia is such a nightmare.
I like that you use the word “discovery” because I thought about using it to describe my Foucauldian reading. Discovery as in the Archeology of Knowledge (L’archéologie du savoir, 1969).
Thank you again, looking forward to the next article!
Wokeism has been compared repeatedly with religion, and rightfully so I think. After the death of christianity, nationalism and communism this is a latest ideology that provides the illusion of purpose as well as justification for the redistribution of other peoples’ property and life chances. It allows even the most humble servants of the cult, who otherwise are socially and politically irrelevant, to play a role in the movement and to display the nasty elements of their souls with impunity.
I like the statistic. My impression however is that it tells a different story, the story of a bifurcated society. A large number of people enrolled in programs that turned them into certified servants, while another large crowd opted for STEM degrees.
The latter usually requires brooding over mathematical problems and formula – the things which are probably even more hated by a majority of students than reading long prose texts. Why then did so many students go that extra mile, which in all likelihood was not to their liking either? Maybe because society rewards holders of STEM degrees with material benefits and social recognition?
Why should any young person feel called upon to become an historian and to do the necessary reading of tedious texts, if the rewards will most likely be destitution and ridicule?
The comparison with the disappearance of Confucian scholarship is interesting. The difference however being that History, if conducted properly, is a social science and not a form of art as the former. Western societies have forgotten many arts and crafts over the centuries too, but it did not seriously hinder social and scientific progress. The decline of actual History is a tragedy that will leave societies vulnerable to demagoguery and propaganda that appear in the disguise of history.
As Paul Valéry has said: “L’histoire est le produit le plus dangereux que la chimie de l’intellect ait élaboré. Ses propriétés sont bien connues. Il fait rêver, il enivre les peuples, leur engendre de faux souvenirs, exagère leurs réflexes, entretient leurs vieilles plaies, les tourmente dans leur repos, les conduit au délire des grandeurs ou à celui de la persécution, et rend les nations amères, superbes, insupportables et vaines.” Unlike Confucian scholarship History is too important to be left to bad scholars and scholars of bad faith.
Yes, I sometimes wonder if future historians will look back at Wokeism and explain it as a brief religious reaction to a changing world, like times in medieval European history when some group of people would start worshipping a sacred goose, or something like that, which they believed could prevent the world from ending. . .
As for “The decline of actual History is a tragedy that will leave societies vulnerable to demagoguery and propaganda that appear in the disguise of history,” if it ever was possible for History to play a positive role in societies, I think the Internet has disrupted that. My belief is that until historians can find a way to gain a presence on the Internet, then we’ll never know if History can play such a positive role again (if in fact it did play that role before).
But on a happier note, Happy New Year!!!
I was about to say that Linguistics is quite high on your statistic chart, and I think it is still quite text-heavy. But on a second thought, Linguistics is already full of illustration and model, with syntactic tree, language family tree, the World Atlas of Language Structure, etc. , so maybe not that text-heavy… Isn’t there any digital project by historians that produce colorful map, chart, illustration on website or something like that?
Thanks for the comment!
Thanks for the comment! Yes, and in recent years I think people have recognized that linguistics is important for AI, so linguistics has done ok.
On your other point, YES, I think that is a major problem. There isn’t much cool history on the Internet/Instagram/YouTube, etc. History is still largely in books, and as long as that remains the norm, I don’t see young people getting excited about it.