Adalaide Morris introduces New Media Poetics: Context, Technotexts & Theories by suggesting that language always strains to catch up with the lived experience. She references the theory posed by experimental poet Gertrude Stein: There is a “lag” between two kinds of knowledge, “what we know because it is what we see and do, and what we know because it is what we think. The first kind of knowledge is instinctive and unself-conscious, located in the body as it moves around the world; the second is categorical, located in the mind as it remembers and elaborates what it has been taught. For Stein, every generation composes and explains its life in terms developed by people who did not see what they now see or do what they now do.” Stein gives the example of World War I generals who created nineteenth-century-esque battle plans that would be fought out with twentieth-century weapons. They would come away from the first Great War utterly shocked by the scale of human death that had occurred because they had misconceived the destructive possibility of the weapons they wielded; hundreds of thousands of deaths had become millions. Stein suggests that we must alter our “categories of thought” to catch up with our experiences as “nimble citizens of an always newly technologized, mediated world.” The trick is not to be ahead of one’s time, but in one’s time.
This “lag” between thought and lived experience leads me to believe that we can mine language — a sort of crystallization of thought — to discover links between the past and present. Take for example, the word empresario, the Spanish word for entrepreneur, used to describe the land magnates who were invited to establish colonies in Northern Mexico in the years following Mexico’s independence (1821). Textual traces of the empresario Stephen F. Austin’s colony, such as letters Austin wrote or journals by his colonists, suggests that the colony was a self-sustaining, insular unit where Austin established the laws, acted as judge, and sought to keep the colony independent from the judiciary reforms of the Mexican central government, though Austin was technically a Mexican statesman. Entrepreneurs today still do exactly the same thing; they construct mini-societies, seek to be self-sustaining ecosystems, and resist interference from the government or the public. We have the beloved image of the American tech startup: A college drop-out rents an apartment for his small team who lives, breathes, eats and works together to create a new service or technology, completely cut off from outside contact. Twenty years later, the college-dropout now-CEO sets the tone for the company culture and acts as the face of the company. He buys buildings with cafeterias that serve all three meals and lounges with unlimited snack bars. The company aspires to create its own internal software tools, hire its own recruiters, and become a completely self-sustaining ecosystem. People have persisted in using the word entrepreneur to describe both the Texan magnate and the American CEO, suggesting that these historical instances resemble one another. The language of the past is a means by which humans make sense of the present.
As a historian, I am always searching for links between the present and the past. People are historical beings. The past provides context and reassurance: it sheds light on the fact that what we experience today is not as new and scary as it seems. In 2009, scholars wondered whether Google’s ambitious project Google Books signaled the end of printed books. My mentor and teacher Anthony Grafton placed Google’s project within a ‘sweeping historical context’ to show that information regimes have existed since before Christ and that humanity has experienced (and survived) other ‘deluges of information’ that Google’s project seemed inevitable to bring. I wonder if we could use language’s “lag” to observe the ways in which our current technological movements have historical precedents. For example:
I can envision an archive that utilizes text-searching and archiving tools, such as those provided by HathiTrust, Google Books and Google BigQuery, to search the content and metadata of historical documents for the words we use for technology today. The archive would filter in some way. It could return sources by time period or by lexical relevance (in other words, we use a more sophisticated algorithm than, “Does the source contain the word?”), and group sources by subject matter (all the sources having to do with “mail,” see example above, are grouped together). We could even create a functionality that scans the most recent posts on some website, like a data security blog, and automatically generates sources based off of the most frequent words used in those posts, so that as one stays updated on the most recent trends in the tech world, they can simultaneously look for historical precedents.