What is an "Age"?

HASTAC Scholar Whitney Trettien of MIT raised important questions of historicity in a comment on my previous blog posting, "The Historian's Dilemma and the Question of Generations,"   http://www.hastac.org/node/1666.   I'd like to follow up with some thoughts that respond to her question and take up historian Robert Darnton's idea that we are living in the "fourth great information age": http://www.hastac.org/node/1662

What I'm thinking about is meta-historical. What, exactly, constitutes "an age." Darnton poses the invention of writing systems as the first great information age. No one knows, exactly, when "writing" was invented. There are marks in caves that may well be writing systems that go back tens of thousands of years. Taxonomies of writing usually designate those as "markings" or "inscription" rather than actual writing, however, and want to reserve the invention of writing for actual accounting systems developed in the 4th century BC in Mesopotamia, largely to facilitate trade. The process of developing those systems worked across all the many countries, East and West, North and South, that traded in the ancient world and the writing systems too evolved. It was a bit scattered, the development was anything but linear, it was uneven, characterized by fits and starts and more fits . . . So the question: does that constitute an "age" and by what definition is it an age?

One might say, in a tautology worthy of Hayden White, that it is an age because historians make it so. That is, we historians gather all the discrete phenomenon into what we define as an episteme and label it an "age" or a "period."

The second age Darnton denotes is the invention of Movable Type. This is also fascinating because, before Wikipedia (!!), the standard histories would say that movable type was invented by Gutenberg in Europe around 1450. But if you go to "movable type" in Wikipedia, you see that scholars who know world history, and not simply European points of view, have added a key addition. Movable type was invented in "China by Bi Sheng out of ceramic between 1041 and 1048 AD. Metal movable type was first invented in Korea during the Goryeo Dynasty (around 1230). Neither movable type system was widely used, probably because of the enormous amount of labour involved in manipulating the thousands of ceramic tablets, or in the case of Korea, metal tablets, required by the use of Chinese characters."

Okay, everyone: where's the "age" there? By the Whitean definition, clearly the "age" depends on whether you are a European historian or one who has studied the traditions in China and Korea in the 11th and 13th centuries respectively.

Darnton's third great information was my bread-and-butter for a long time in my career, and it is returning to teaching mass culture, mass printing, public education, and the spread of literacy in the era of the Constitution that has made me think about ages again, and the relationship of that phenomenon in the history of literacy in the U.S. (I can't make too many claims beyond that; it's not my expertise) and the current era. My chronology for this "age" is obviously different from a historian of China, Africa, or Latin America. It is even different depending on which area of what was to become the "United States" is being studied. Again, "age" is temporal, spacial, and disciplinarily defined.

And our present Information Age, the fourth great one? I like arraying it alongside the other three because of what it teaches and what it misses---that, of course, was the point of Darnton's magisterial argument. Lining up the timeline helps us to see the contours of our own time in relief. It's less about the accuracy and inclusiveness of the previous "ages" than something that helps us to understand our own. Never an easy task. Understanding one's own 'time' is analogous to understanding one's own 'culture.' It's almost impossible to see what you are in the midst of.

Whitney's question then is exactly right. And it delights me that it was asked by someone who is working in the Comparative Media Studies program at MIT where (I'm quoting from her bio) "she is exploring the relationship between seventeenth-century poetry generators and the practices of contemporary digital poetry. She also works at the HyperStudio lab for the digital humanities. In her free time she enjoys collecting dictionaries and cooking with pinto beans." All that. Without any facetiousness, I would say that one problem with the overgeneralizing "age" concept is that it leaves out the pinto beans.

Thanks, Whitney, for this great provocation. I invite anyone to join us in this discussion.