am i making sense?

A paradigm shift changes the fundamentals of a field of understanding. Alistair Thompson uses this term to describe four major paradigm shifts in oral history. These shifts move the craft of oral history from a modern rediscovery following World War II with the advent of the portable tape recorder through reaction to positivist critics, reclamation by interdisciplinary scholars, and to the contemporary era of digital transformation. Thompson characterizes the digital transformation as a change in the way that oral history will be presented. Access to digital archives will allow recordings to supersede transcripts as the true representation of a narrator’s story, returning aurality to the craft. While those changes as well as the ease of collaboration online stand to transform the methods of oral history, Thompson wonders if this change represents a true paradigm shift “as articulated by Thomas Kuhn, a profound change in understanding that revolutionizes our practice as oral historians” and if “this technological revolution [is] also a cognitive revolution.” Even though the medium impacts the message, technology could just offer a new way to view oral history and not a profound cognitive change. The question might be best put, according to Thompson, to the younger generation more adept with the new and changing landscape of technology.

New media do offer a new way to communicate narrators’ stories, but scholars in a variety of fields have explored the profound effects of technology on the concepts of self that is central to oral history. Elizabeth Tonkin describes oral genres that oral historians must note as their storytellers narrate, and that the first person “I” that we might assume to be represented as they narrate is a literary construction. Several “selves” can be present within one narrator. In Appadurai’s technoscape , supercharged by increasing access to the internet in more places , these selves can influence and be influenced by an exploding number of cultural influences. The combination of globalization and technology will create the next paradigm shift for oral history by impacting both the context and the voice that are central to the craft.