The digital revolution
toothbrush. 41 In fact, in Europe there are more mobile phones than people. There are 2.5 billion digital camera owners worldwide. 42 There is a marked difference in quantity between pre- and post-Digital Age communication: the 800 million active users on Facebook share more than 3.5 billion pieces of information every week. 43 It has taken Facebook only a few short years to become a photo library more than 10,000 times the size of the Library of Congress. The digital age has not simply allowed a great increase in the amount of content being created, but - since this increase is so great - changed the meaning of this content. Modern digital cameras can now shoot up to 5 frames per second, changing the way in which photography can document history. Where, in the past, there may have been only a few images of a historic event there now can literally be hundreds. If John F Kennedy were assassinated in the 21st century it is likely that rather than one video of him being shot, there would be many - from varying angles - and that there would be hundreds and hundreds of photographs. Go back to the previous famous assassination of an American president - Abraham Lincoln - and there is no photographic evidence: again, it would have been a completely different story had it happened in the 21st century. Where once globalization meant the ability to reach America in less that two weeks or receive a message hours after it had been sent, it now means reaching America in 41 ‘Social Media Statistics for 2012’, digitalbuzzblog: http://www.digitalbuzzblog.com/social-media- statistics-stats-2012-infographic (27/08/12) 42 ‘How many photos have ever been taken?’, 1000memories blog: http://blog.1000memories.com/94-number-of- photos-ever-taken-digital-and-analog-in-shoebox (05/07/12) 43 Even if the level of growth in users achieved by Facebook in 2011 stays level for the next six years, and does not increase, as it has been doing, two billion people will be active users by 2017 - almost one in three.
hours and sending and receiving communication instantaneously. 44
As technology affects journalism, this new journalism affects history: the digital age is overhauling the way in which history is made. 45 By the very nature of history, this impact is delayed, but future historians will study how the spread of connectivity changed the way in which their subject evolved. The digital revolution will be greater and more significant to the narrative of humanity than its industrial counterpart a century and a half earlier. The digital age, therefore, does not change merely the way in which we perceive and understand the world around us, nor does it only the change the speed at which we do so: it changes the way in which the world around us will be shaped. History in the last decade is increasingly being made by one of the most influential elements of the Digital Revolution: ‘social media’ - the equivalent of making available a printing press to every peasant and priest alike during the Reformation. The new generation of the 21st century is equipped with the mightiest communication (and propaganda) machine the world has ever seen. 46 There is no 44 2011’s royal wedding in Britain proved a good example of the immediacy of this new digital age: billions around the world watched it, while photographers outside Buckingham Palace had cameras which instantly sent their images back to a news desk so that newspapers could be ready to go to print just twenty minutes after the images had been captured. 45 It is not new that both journalism and history do more than report past events: they shape the future course of events. One day journalism becomes history and then history journalism. For instance, in Ireland, the old Yugoslavia and Israel history (albeit it bad history) became embroiled in current affairs, causing conflict, and thus leading to old history becoming the domain of journalism. 46 New generations and the young have always spearheaded change. The social and cultural revolutions beginning in the mid-20th century and flowering in the late 60s with the ‘Summer of Love’, the advent of feminism, global popular music and a
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