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All the documents in the world shall be linked, says many of the early dreamers of the web. And this small post in googlenewsblog is probably a big step in realising that dream.
A scan from the oldest entry in Google News Archive, from 1753
A search on ‘colonialism’ from 1860-2009 on google news archive shows a timeline of articles where, if what the mass media concerns themselves with is a reflection of our society, we are more concerned with colonialism than ever. Or at least, maybe if we take into account the number of news outlets in the different decades, we are still as concerned with colonialism as ever before.
One of the oldest result is a scan of a paper published in 1871 New Zealand on how ‘the war is…producing the usual numbers of marvellous compounds’, where a ‘new murderous missile’ was invented in France, and a judge calls upon some new graduates of a school to be ‘good colonists’ in NZ and Australia by becoming ‘good stockmen, good axemen, good sawyers,…able to climb a crag and swim a river.’
And swimming to the other end of the river of information, about 2 hours ago, someone, maybe a media student on internship, sat in front a computer somewhere in Lebanon, struggled with html codes before finally pressing ‘publish’ for the nth time, and an opinion piece was published online by The Daily Star about the Arab-Israeli conflicts.* The Israelis must take colonialism out of zionism, the writer argues.
Being a good colonist now is probably not as adventurous as it was in 1871, but to be a good journalist or researcher definitely calls for new skills in climbing the crags and rivers of information.
For a long time, we’ve had gigantic libraries filled with valuable documents, or small gloryboxes filled with news clippings about grandfathers winning local bowling competitions. But to have millions of these documents searchable and linkable, in the words of a Techcrunch writer, is ‘fairly insane’.
*the student part is purely imagined. But, as anyone who has gone through volunteer or intership gigs can be a witness to, this could be true. ”Where’s my coffee!” has now been replaced by “Um..can you work out this internet thing?”.