Sharon’s comment on yesterday’s post got me wondering what sorts of social interactions have fallen by the wayside as technologies have faded away or have been supplanted.
There was quite likely a rich set of personal interactions in the late nineteenth century around, say, sharing piano sheet music, back when it was a dominant mode of experiencing music. We still have sheet music today, but it is no longer culturally central to the general experience of music.
One could probably fill an entire museum with the interactive media from any given era — the traditions of physical sharing and interpersonal interaction that surrounded traveling, reading, writing, dining, watching a sports game, listening to music, gossiping, gathering for prayer, social drinking, or just the process of getting dressed in the morning.
Some of those bygone ways of being have been represented — often in idealized or altered form — in movies with stories that are set in earlier times. But it’s not clear that the filmmakers got it right (I strongly suspect that the Hollywood version of courtly behavior in the European middle ages is more than a little half-baked). After all, up until the late 19th century we have only drawings, paintings and the written word as our guide — we don’t know how everything moved. It takes serious scholarship to tease out those sorts of details from the available record.
Perhaps the findings of serious scholars would be better disseminated if there were a museum that conveyed what we know of those lost ways that people of other eras used socially connecting technologies. A museum of Paleo-interactive technology.
And one wonders, would it be an online museum (like, e.g., http://www.imow.org)? Because you know those brick and mortar museums are becoming so yesterday 😉
Maybe it’s just the crazy way my mind works, but the instant I saw what imow stands for (International Museum of Women), I changed the ‘w’ to an ‘m’ in the address field of my browser, and hit ENTER — just to see whether there would be any gender parity.
But of course, even as I started doing that, it occurred to me that imom is perhaps the apotheosis of a perfectly bad URL for a museum about men.
Not surprisingly, it turned out to be a dead link. 🙂
I’m sorry you guys don’t have your own online museum. Sounds like an opportunit :). But yeah, don’t call it imom. (Maybe Apple already has an iMom planned. One can only imagine…)
Thanks. We guys will just have to start scouting around for a name.
“International Promenade of Patriarchs” doesn’t have quite the right ring to it, and Apple probably owns that one too.
Sigh.