From Calendars to Chronicles: 2

For the longest time, people have been interested in past events as well as the discovery, collection, organization, and presentation of information about these events. The motivations for this ranges from simply revisiting enjoyable events to creating knowledge by analyzing and relating events in many different forms. Much of the knowledge that exists is a result of such analysis. Events related to a person were of interest, we were the events related to any organization, place, or a collection of any person, any other living organism or any organization. In a sense any living organism has events happening that describe it’s growth and behavior. To understand any living organism and predict its future behavior models are formed and such models are always based on the its past behavior. It was believed that the past behavior inferred from past events is at least an indicator of future behavior. Humans like to partially predict future for planning purpose.

A chronicle is a record of past events. For individuals such chronicle were created in the form of diaries, auto-biographies, biographies, and just description of individual events. For any organization ranging from structured minutes of meetings to just description of events from different people existed. Even scientific records are maintained in chronicles ranging from laboratory notebooks to published research papers. Storytelling became a popular form of presenting a sequence of such events and continues to remain so.

The art of chronicling evolved as civilization adopted new technology. Earliest chronicles were oral. With writing, chronicles took new shape and gained more permanence. But a major progress in chronicling took place with printing technology and mass adoption of print technology for dissemination of information. The interest in chronicles related to different aspects of society resulted in introduction and rapid growth of Newspaper related technology. Newspapers, magazines, and journals became almost daily consumption habit of people and independent of the fact that printing has evolved and now exists in digital multimedia format, the habit of following chronicles in different form continues. Jounalism, editing, and publishing became important disciplines and will continue to remain so due to mass interest and dependence of society on chronicles.

With progress in digital media, we saw change in format of chronicles. With social media, we now have democratization of chronicle creation. Anybody can now join Facebook or Twitter and start reporting on event in their own life, their organization, or just about any thing that they observe or are interested in. This is a huge change in chronicles. Equally important change is the media of chronicles. Chronicles started as report by an individual first in oral form and then in text form, which is dependent on human expression. The last decade has seen a major change in use of photos and videos as for mass reporting of events. Photos and videos capture the events in more objective and natural visual and audio form. This has changed the way we like to experience events and share events.

But it appears that we are at the cusp of even more radical form for capturing, storing, organizing, and sharing events and creating knowledge from these events.