Tuesday, December 13, 2016
What if Google Was There 100 Years Ago
What if Google Was There 100 Years Ago
A couple of weeks back there was wide coverage of the Nelson Mandela digital Museum. The overall tone was that it was a good thing although there were some of the opinion that the whole coverage on Nelson Mandela was disproportionate given the immense contribution of other apartheid struggle icons like Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu and Chris Hani. However, the whole digitizing project got me thinking.
Suppose Google was there 100 years ago, assuming Nelson Mandela was going to use it just imagine the possibilities. If Nelson Mandela had used Google we might be able now to go through his Gmail emails and see how he communicated and planned the anti-apartheid movements. Suppose he used Google Docs, to create and backup his documents just imagine the wealth of information that will be at the fingertips of historians and political scientists alike. Granted, some of his letters and documents have survived and are stored somewhere safe but I bet that you need to fill in a thousand and one forms before you are allowed access to them, if at all. Suppose, Mandela used Picasa (Yeh yeh Google we know it’s no longer called Picasa now but who cares anyway) and he stored all his pictures there. Today we could have an invaluable cache of visual insight into a man whom the world has come to revere. They say a picture is worth more than a thousand words and I am convinced that say a lot about how such a photo collection will be invaluable today.
We have email in our digital lives but IM exists for a reason. It’s our digital voice. It’s the voice that we use for that close to use while we relegate email to more important issues like letters to the boss. IM is the tool we use for those close to use because we speak and we are assured of a prompt response, which is what we lesser folks call conversation. Therefore if Google was there 100 years ago we would move beyond the Nelson Mandela that the world knows to Nelson Mandela, the man, with all his strengths and imperfections unaltered. We could get to know the truth behind the rumours of that illegitimate child whispered in dark corners. We could have known all the details surrounding his eventual divorce to Winnie Mandela. Most importantly, we could get to the bottom of the circumstances of how he came to marry Graca Machel whose husband was alleged to have been killed by the South African apartheid regime. How did they meet? Were the feelings there when both were still married to their respective spouses? Or did they take advantage of the situation when their respective spouses were conveniently out of the way? Personally, I would have loved to know a whole lot more about the acrimonious spat Nelson Mandela had with Robert Mugabe over the DRC crisis when the latter was head of the SADC Organ on Politics, Defence and Security.
But I am digressing. If Google was here 100 years ago I would like to believe other 21st luminaries and villains alike would have used it. Imagine having access to the Google credential of the likes of Albert Einstein, Idi Amin, Martin Luther King, Josef Stalin and Mao Zedong. Now the works of those gentleman, their papers, private letters, photos and other literary effects are locked in museums only accessible physically and if you travel to wherever they are kept. I know Google is resourceful but I don’t think all those works will be digitized in our generation. As a PhD student using personal documents donated to my university by one generous gentleman for my primary research, I know how valuable it is to access the notes and papers of influential people.
Maybe its not too late after all for Google to salvage something. It’s within Googles power to make Barack Obamas notes and papers accessible to future generations so they can learn how difficult and different it is to be the first US black president. It is possible that, after convincing the right and select people, future generations won’t have to lament ‘if only Google was there 100years ago’ as they would have access to digital notes and papers of influential people which we don’t and might not have access to now.
Available link for download
