Blogging

If blogging was around 100 years ago, would history still be recorded on paper?

Blogging is seen to some, not just as a way of communicating, but also as personal entertainment. Since the development of blogger (in September 2009), blogger  has been known as a technological novelty, in which one person or a group of people collectively can express there thoughts and opinions on a subject of their choice. Its impact on politics and education has been massive.

Blogs are an expression of personality, usually written in the 1^st person, made so that people can contribute in terms of comments. Blogs are also ways of socialising and advertising.

In terms of history many historical event have been recorded in diary form. It makes you wonder, if blogging was around years ago would history still have been hand written, or word processed.

Anne Frank was a young girl who hid for 2 years in her neighbours attic in attempt to hide from the Nazi's who wanted to send her and her family to a concentration camp. During the two years in hiding she wrote a diary, years later it was seen as a piece of history that gave people a great insight into life as a Jew in the early 1940's and more specifically showed what Anne had to go through. 

(Above is an example of history being recorded on paper; on the left is Anne Frank's actual diary and on the right is the book that was created with it.)

If the technology that we have today was available in the 1940's I wonder in Miss Frank would still have chosen to write a hand written diary. She could quite easily have written a blog and her material would have been published a lot quicker than it was. Additionally people would have been able to comment openly on her entries and she would have been able to gain feed back, rather than her work. Nowadays people have the choice of how they record their information and an online version may have been easier, especially if she had a smart phone.

If Frank was alive today and was in the same predicament I think that she would would use some form of advanced technology if it was available to her rather than writing a diary. It's hard to predict what she would have done because I'm not her but when you think about it most people, especially young people think that technology is faster, more interesting and much more secure (it can be hard to hide something in your house that you don't want to be read rather than hiding it on your computer).

So in answer to my question, yes I think that if computers, the Internet and blogs where around in Anne Frank's time, that we would historians would be reading her recordings on the computer rather than from paper.