The stories we tell about ourselves
Thinking
Last week on the SIGCIS listserv, someone circulated a new-ish collection of oral histories out of Stanford's engineering school, which includes some big-name computer scientists. I was excited to see Martin Hellman and Vint Cerf on the list--two big players in modern cryptography and the internet, respectively. I've used a couple of oral histories from both of them for my dissertation so far, but more is always better, right?
I'm starting to realize that's not necessarily true, not for oral histories.
All of this comes from the perspective of having never conducted oral history interviews myself. I've thought about it, and so far have decided that it is both more work than I can do right now and methodologically complicated for my project. But I have made pretty heavy use of some oral histories conducted by, for example, the Charles Babbage Institute, especially its NSF-funded series on computer security history.
Reading multiple interviews of the same people, it becomes very easy to see the stories they tell about themselves, repeated almost verbatim. It's only human, after all. We make sense of things by telling stories, so we make sense of ourselves by telling stories. We tell the same anecdotes over and over again, until our partners and friends roll their eyes at the punchlines.
I tweeted about this last week:
https://twitter.com/jillianefoley/status/1580653484264738816
I got some replies from people who have done a lot of interviewing, about how this is a real challenge for the interviewer! When you see someone trotting out an obviously well-worn anecdote, you start to wonder how seriously to take it. This is even why some historians avoid interviews altogether, particularly of well-known people or those with well-known personal narratives. Oral histories in general are challenging to do and use well, because people have fallible memories, and can be biased by interview questions, and can elide and not-quite-lie both consciously and unconsciously in ways that make their recollections difficult to rely on.
But I’m realizing (and I said this on twitter, too) that the solidified stories are useful in their own way. The repeated anecdotes and common story arcs across interviews separated by decades tell us: this narrative is useful to me. This story means something. It may not mean the “objective truth,” but it can tell us how subsequent history has understood past events, or how a particular community has emphasized or shamed some actions over others. It can tell us the things that someone thinks were important enough, or interesting enough to build into a regular dinner party tale. The things they’ve built their personality around.
It might not tell us what happened on a particular day, but it can tell us how those events were later understood by the person being interviewed. And that can still be incredibly useful.
Reading
I just finished The Last Resort by Sarah Stodola on audiobook this week. It's a very pleasant meander through the history of beach resorts, and a mildly interesting if not particularly thorough discussion of some of the sustainability and ethical problems around them. It's the first book I've read where the seams from the pandemic are extremely obvious. Some chapters discuss it directly, and the ones that don't are still pretty identifiable as either "written pre-covid" or "at least edited post-covid."
Narratively, the book was an interesting study for me in that it kept my interest throughout without having an obvious overarching structure beyond focusing on one or two beaches at a time. Of course, maybe there was one that was too subtle for me to notice! Maybe I was just not paying enough attention! But it really seemed to wander from place to place, not geographically, not chronologically. Which maybe was the structure, after all--a Western nomad's aimless journey through beach history.
I don't think this was the goal of the book, per se, but now I really want to go to the beach.
Doing
I finally used some airline miles this week. My husband and I have a terrible habit of never using either airline miles or credit card points. He says he's always worried about optimizing how we use them; the only other time we've used them was to upgrade an international flight to Japan (incredible! worth it!). I say I'm always "saving" them, like how as a kid I always used to hoard my favorite hot chocolate packets for a "special occasion" that never seemed to happen.
Anyway, a Slack discussion recently made me grit my teeth and use some damn miles! Sure does feel good to get that $800 worth of plane tickets (not to the beach, alas).