Creating A "Green" Future: The American Revolution, Consumer Action, and "Ecological Intelligence," Part 1

Part One --- Part Two --- Part Three Part Four --- Part Five --- Part Six

About two months ago, I read Daniel Goleman’s new book Ecological Intelligence. It’s terrific and I recommend it.

Among other things, he examines the ways in which consumer behavior can function as the catalyst for substantive, indeed, profound, ecological change.

One part of his argument is this: Thanks to the powers of digitization, it’s possible to track the “ecological life cycle” of any good --- ham, shoes, mascara, flooring, etc. --- and to inform consumers of that good’s life cycle, so that consumers can make point-of-sale decisions about whether to use Brand X or Brand Y, depending on its ecological history. (This life cycle history, by the way, is known as a Life Cycle Assessment.)

He argues that consumers will act ecologically when they have ready access to information; “ready” in this case meaning at the point of sale: while standing in the grocery or furniture store thinking about making the purchase. (Again, I'm simplifying a more complex argument.)

I was curious to know what other readers thought, so I went to Amazon. At the time (again, this was a couple of months ago), the only review consisted of the following:

Goleman's narrow view of ecological intelligence is limited to how to be a better consumer. He does not address the fundamental questions of our culture's core beliefs about our place as individuals in the greater ecosystem.

If you're looking for fresh ideas on expanding beyond relating to the world as a marketplace, you will probably be disappointed.

My reaction was “Gee, that guy doesn’t know much about history.” Because if he did, he’d know that the American revolution was fueled in large part by consumer-based action.

“Huh?” you say. “Consumer action? I thought the American revolution was about taxes and representation. What’s consumer action got to do with it?” Almost everything. Sure, taxes, representation, and Parliament’s excessive intrusion into colonial life helped fuel the revolution, but so did the colonists’ understanding of their actions as consumers.

Next time: Revolution, American and otherwise

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 4 of 4

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4 One more point about saving newspapers: Newspapers as source material and the weirdness of what matters and what doesn’t. (This, by the way, isn’t directly  connected to the three previous parts of this series, but it’s as good a place as any to make my point.)

As I mentioned in part one, historians today enjoy access to digital archives of many newspapers. It’s possible to read and search the first issue ever published of, say, the New York Times and the Boston Globe. Makes sense, right? We all know that those are important daily newspapers with huge readerships. They’re both regarded as significant records of American life.

Here’s the kicker: Those newspapers were archived because they’re the survivors. But in the nineenth century, neither newspaper was particularly important. Indeed, for decades, the New York Times was a no-account also-ran to three other newspapers: The New York Herald, the New York Tribune, and the New York World. (Throw in the NY Sun, and you’ve got the nation’s Big Four of the nineteenth century). (Several of these papers folded into each other. At one point, for example, the Herald and Tribune merged.) Ditto the Boston Globe, an also-ran to a number of that's city's newspapers.

If you’re a historian and you want to research nineteenth century America, you want to read the most important sources, right? You want to read the NY Tribune or the NY Herald. Lotso luck. All of the afore-mentioned are available on microfilm, but not digitally. There’s a not very useful printed index for the Tribune (or is it the Herald?), but no way otherwise to search these important sources.

Why? Because when various libraries began filming newspapers in the twentieth century, they focused on what were THEN the important papers, in this case the Times and the Globe, rather than the newspapers that had been, in the 19th century, larger and more widely read.

So historians have access to amazing digital newspaper archives -- but those are not necessarily the archives that matter most for historical research. The same is true, by the way, for the two main archives for small-town newspapers: newspaperarchive.com and geneaologybank.com. (Although I have to say that if you can only subscribe to one, go with geneaologybank.com. Newspaperarchive.com is badly designed, riddled with bugs, and hard to use.)

Don’t get me wrong: these are amazing resources for historians. Using these two archives, I’ve been able to piece together the story of major changes in nineteenth century American meat processing and distribution, a story that has never been fully told because of lack of sources.

But those databases also contain newspapers that various Powers That Be decreed as important. In this case, there’s a definitely skew toward New England newspapers, especially ones published in Massachusetts.  (Big relief! By sheer coincidence, the meat-related changes I’m researching unfolded Massachusetts.)

Put another way, these databases are based on decisions made decades ago by various historical societies that decided X was important, not Y. What’s the conclusion? As always, nothing with any wow-factor. Digital newspaper archives are extraordinary tools for research, but no one should assume that they’re perect, or that they’re accurate representations of American society in the past.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 3

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

Okay, so we know that owners of newspapers typically preserve copies of the printed edition. But what about the electronic editions of defunct newspapers?

Consider the Rocky Mountain News, which went under a couple of weeks ago. I’m certain that the printed editions of that newspaper were preserved, either by filming, scanning, or digitization. As of this moment, the site is still online. It’s not being updated, of course -- it’s essentially frozen at the moment of that last issue -- but you can still search its old contents. (And it has a fee-based archive that goes back to the 1980s.)

But -- who or what will maintain that site? For that matter, who will own and administer access to that electronic archive?

Websites are like empty houses:  Someone needs to show up once in awhile to make sure the roof’s not leaking and no one’s broken in. Same with abandoned websites. Someone needs to maintain it -- or not. If the site is abandoned, eventually all of its contents will disappear. That's the same as hauling the newspaper's paper documents to the city dump.

Frankly, the thought of these sites vanishing is, well, an unhappy one. If the New York Times goes under (god forbid; it's a planetary treasure), will some deep-pocketed person or organization agree to administer the online site?

But the growing number of defunct newspapers also poses another, paper-related matter, namely, what will become of the paper trail generated in the process of publishing a daily newspaper? For example, the staff of the Rocky Mountain News generated photographs (not all of which landed on the website or in the printed edition); drafts of stories; reporters' notes; telephone records; management memos; and other paper-based documents.

In theory, that material will be boxed for storage, and the entity that owns the company itself will look for a repository for this material. A logical choice is the Colorado State Historical Society, or perhaps Special Collections at the University of Colorado or some other university, or the Denver Public Library.

The catch here is money: Anyone can donate material to a historical society or library. You can donate your shopping lists, kids' drawings, family photos, and anything else your heart desires to save. But unless you also donate some some cash, it can be difficult for the recipient to do much with the material except store it in a warehouse.

That's because the task of sorting through and cataloging that paper-based material requires the services of professional archivists. Like everyone else, archivists don’t work for free, so until and unless an institution can afford to sort, process, and catalog a paper collection, it will sit in boxes. (I hasten to add boxes of archival material are stored in buildings with high-tech controls for humidity and temperature.)

So the short answer to the question that launched this series is that newspapers have been saving their contents, but the future of the paper version of a newspaper is more certain than the future of its online version. Which is completely counterintuitive, but hey, this the Age of E-Quarius. Who knows what will happen?

NEXT: How a historian's research is affected by what is, and is not, saved.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 2

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

As I mentioned in the previous post, in the past decade or so, some large newspapers have digitized their contents. For example, the Chicago Tribune, the New York Times, and the Boston Globe have all been stored as digital complete runs, -- meaning every word/image of every issue ever published has been scanned into a digital “archive.”

Access to those archives are managed through a company called ProQuest, which earns revenue by licensing use of these archives. You can visit the Globe’s website, for example, and, by paying a small fee, gain access to and search the entire Globe archive. ProQuest also licenses the use of these digital runs to university and college libraries where students and faculty can access them for free. (If you need to do research of any kind, a university library is an incredible resource.)

So in theory, the content of paper newspapers have been preserved. BUT: What's not clear is the future of the electronic versions of newspapers, nor is it clear what will happen to the web contents of defunct newspapers. Remember: an online version of a newspaper is different from its print version. The ads are different. The content differs, etc.

This is important for historians in particular. In the past thirty or so years, a number of historians have studied newspaper advertising as a way of analyzing shifts in consumer tastes, in the rhetoric of advertising, and so forth. (See especially the work of Roland Marchand.) Indeed, advertisements are key primary documents for historical research.

But as I noted above, the ad content of a paper newspaper is typically quite different than that its electronic counterpart. Moreover, the ad content of an online edition is dynamic: it changes from day to day.

Think about it: If I visit, say, the New York Times website and search for an article published in 1985, it will come up with either no ads, OR with ads attached from the 2009 edition. What I won't see is the context that surrounded that article when it first appeared in 1985. For historians, that's a problem, so from historians’ perspective, how and what gets saved matters.

What's not clear to me is if anyone has pondered this problem. I perused the website of the American Historical Association, the main professional organization for professional historians. If they've got a plan,they're keeping it under wraps. (I kind of doubt they do. Their own website is astoundingly ill-maintained.)

NEXT: Preserving and archiving newspapers' paper trails, their websites, and their digital editions.

Historians and the Preservation of Newspaper Content, Part 1

Part 1 --- Part 2 --- Part 3 --- Part 4

Loyal Reader Dexter asked a couple of good questions the other day.

What, he wondered, will happen to the newspapers that are closing? Have historians thought about how to save the papers’ contents once they’re gone?

Good questions and ones of enormous importance to historians like me. For decades-going-into-centuries, newspapers have functioned as one of historians' main sources of information. Think of a newspaper as an eyewitness account of say, life, in 1880.

Nowadays, of course, we have a wealth of "eyewitness" accounts of contemporary life. Historians of the future are gonna be overwhelmed with sources.

The short answer to his questions are:

In many cases, maybe even most cases, the contents have already been saved/preserved. Here’s why: For the past thirty or forty years, the owners of many newspapers have microfilmed their contents on a regular basis. Every month, or, for some papers, every three or four months, an employee gathers paper copies and sends them off to the filming service. A few weeks later, the service ships reels of film to the newspaper.

In the 1960s and after, many big newspapers also used microfilming to create film-based archives of their contents back to day one of the newspaper’s publication. So, for example, the entire contents of every issue of the New York Times has been available on microfilm for decades. Microfilm isn’t searchable, of course, except by eye, but it’s been a valuable tool for historians for years and years.

A few years ago, the Times also began digitizing that film, so that every word of every issue is also available as a digital database that can be searched using keywords. (That, by the way, completely altered life as we know it for historians like me.)

So in theory, most newspapers have been saved. The exceptions are very tiny weeklies, of the sort found in rural parts of the country. Here in Iowa, for example, there are a still a few of these small operations that cover strictly local news (school lunch menus, deaths, weddings, town council meetings and the like). My guess is that most of those small operations can’t afford to pay for filming services, and so they likely save paper copies.

Happily, in both small towns and in large cities, public libraries also function as repositories for newspapers, either in paper form (which takes up a lot of space) or, more often, by owning reels of the microfilmed copies. So even if a small town newspaper goes under, it's safe to assume that copies of the newspaper will still exist in at least one place.

NEXT TIME: Digitization, newspapers' paper trail, and perservation.

It's Not the 1930s. It's the 1970s.

Unless you've been glued to Second Life or some computer game the past six months, you've noticed all the talk about how current economic crisis is like the 1930s.

Okay. Sure. But it feels to me more like the 1970s. I was in my early 20s then, and the economic chaos -- inflation, deflation, stagflation, younameitation -- hit hard. I worked two, three jobs at a time and barely kept pace. (And I was single with no dependents and no debt. I didn't have a mortgage, a credit card, or even a checking account.) (Not trying to make you feel sorry for me; just trying to provide a sense that everyone struggled.)

Anyway, here's what I remember most about that decade: Reading newspaper interviews with people in their fifties and sixties who'd been laid off and believed, and assumed, that they would never return to work.

Their pessimism was probably not misplaced. The nation's economy underwent a profound transformation and whole industries, and the jobs attached to them, vanished. That's why all those steel plants litter the landscape of the upper midwest: they shut down and never reopened.

I've believed for some time that that's what's happening now, and finally, today, I find some evidence. Read it and ponder . . .