it May be that the infinite loop of talk of “digitalization” in politics and the economy is a Symptom of the fact that we already live in a digital culture? According to a common Thesis to the semantics of such a culture through a reconstruction of modern Time-and -experience of Excel, which opens in a history forgotten absolutism to the present. Because if the future is always already there and continuously under the pressure of the reaction sets, Vice versa, the “Surplus and surprise potential” liberal historical thought (Reinhart Koselleck), which referred to an open future.

This presenteeism would also explain the fact that the Humanities (as an eminent historical Sciences) in the current performance of the digitization of drama has no place. In the myriad of digitization”initiatives,” “strategies,” or even “Offensive”, the struggle for political attention, an appropriate “burn rate” of funding and to air superiority in the area of “Innovation”, you are in any case virtually non-existent. Unless knowledge as a consultancy capable of ethics or applicable “Reflection” in homeopathic doses, to ensure that everything is also somehow a “person approaching”.

Against this Background, the conference “history in the Digital age” at the Collegium Helveticum (collectively, an exception is initiated by the ETH Zurich and the University of Vienna). Against the hegemony of the economically profitable digitization Rhetoric has put the Thesis that the digital era had gone hand in hand with a reorganization of culture, whose history, however, is full of conflicting experiences, high-flying expectations, a more difficult learning processes and ingenious solutions – and therefore historiography is capable of. In the sense of Hans Blumen Berg’s dictum, that there were no witnesses to the era thresholds were set by the organizers, a high target. Because your assertion with fundamental questions of era determination go hand in hand: according to the periodization and the relevant factors and characteristics, in accordance with the scale of the observed phenomena and, not least, according to the scientific methods and Epistemologies of observational epoch.

exit from the history

For joy and Wonder about Déjà-vu in the history of the computerization of the lecture by Malte Thiessen (Münster), the digitization measures for agriculture, schools and industry reconstructed the concrete implementation of earlier areas from a regional historical perspective provided. The Ministry of culture of North Rhine-had a 1972 Westphalia, called a AG “school computer”, because a “maschinennahes basic understanding” was necessary, in order to be the digital future grown and by the early enlightenment, to the social dangers of the computer to prevent. As PCs were a decade later, then, in fact, was dodgy. After the primary schools were ahead, because the digitization was represented as an engine of social inequality, applied to the rapid onset of culture and critical debate in order to “Videotie” and “impairment of the ability to think” sheet. Now you do not want to trust possibly even high school students the Disposition to get stupid on the Computer. What then, again a few years later, once again, the main schools were off because of practical “media literacy acquisition” of the speech was that would spend their lives later on anyway to screen jobs. And after the thing had been done silently, because of PCs and the World Wide Web had become commonplace, was able to press the Reset button for these kinds of experiences and again the slogan of “schulen ans Netz” will be issued.