Conclusion

I feel that the fact that you just put up with such a warped, lengthy meandering rumination on personal computers and history means that you deserve something short, sweet, and frank – a sort of bucket of ice water to wake you up from my dizzying mental journey.

Thus, to conclude: I think widespread access to personal computers has changed how people (granted, predominantly first-world people, but again, a topic for a different essay) conceptualize history. History has long been written by the elite, by the powerful, by the winners. Personal computers provide easy, widespread access to the internet, which includes sites with strong emphasis on user-generated content – in essence, user-generated personal histories. For the sake of brevity (that’s not quite a joke, but I do realize this essay is creeping up in fifty pages), I’ve tried to focus on Wikipedia, Facebook, and Twitter, but I hope other, smaller sites like DeviantArt, YouTube, Wordpress, Blogger, webs.com, and their ilk don’t go unexamined. I feel I’ve made a pretty decent case that people who have grown up establishing an online presence have left self-generated records of themselves, their experiences, and their perspectives on larger, “historical” events.

However, I want to bring home my initial guiding principle in exploring online histories – my personal search for my long-dead grandfather. The minutiae of his existence (which could, today, come from Facebook, Twitter, and the like) are almost entirely lost. For the internet, James Richard Kane (or is his name Richard James Kane? Dick Kane? Who was he?) exists almost entirely in terms of his service in World War Two.

What was that, exactly? Unless you’ve done reading outside this essay, you don’t know, and I’ve deliberately kept myself in the dark up to this point, so that if you’ve been sticking to my perspective, we’ll find out together (in a sense). I do a quick search of http://www.69th-infantry-division.com/combat/combat.html - a page off a site I linked previously – for my grandfather’s regiment, the 273rd.

Now, a moment of suspense for you, though a much longer moment of suspense for me, as I have to interrupt my research and concurrent writing to attend a screening for class. I have the combat narrative open in the other window, and it’s killing me that I have to go to class (since this essay is for the same class, though, I feel the need to point out that the screening is also interesting, just a half-hour walk away and through the rain).

The 273rd Infantry crossed what the website calls “the infamous Siegfried Line” taking artillery fire from the Germans, and later crossed the Rhine. “On April 16,” the site says, “the 273rd Infantry captured the town of Colditz and liberated Colditz Castle, freeing many Allied prisoners.” During the battle for Leipzig, the 273rd fought to the south of the city, which eventually fell to the Allied forces. Only nine days later, “on the afternoon of 25 April 1945, a patrol of 11 men led by Lt. Albert L. Kotzebue of the 273rd Infantry Regiment made the historic contact at Leckwitz on the Elbe River with the 58th Guard Division, 34th Corps, General Jadov's 5th Ukrainian Army, Marshal Koniev's First Ukrainian Front.” This contact is “historic” because it was the first meeting between American and Russian troops during the Second World War; the internet reaches a fairly strong consensus that this was a turning point in the war. If all the information you and I have seen to this point is correct, my grandfather, Richard Kane, was there.

I could get into “aura” and “affect” and Walter Benjamin here, but I don’t want to. The internet is only one way I have access to my grandfather in the present, and I hope it is not the sole avenue by which the future can access me.

[here I will have two photos, accessed on Facebook, one of my cousin, one of my brother and father, all of whom look like my grandpa.]