It's been a while since I even heard the word Luddite. I've just quickly looked them up and ironically the movement started in Nottingham, where I'm from. I'd never even heard about the movement before and our school was usually pretty good at talking to us about local history as well. Classes visited Arkwright's Mills on excursions, although they're actually in Cromford, Derbyshire.
When we look at things on the scale of hundreds or thousands of years, I feel like a digital world will probably not be around forever, which is kind of comforting. It's probably here to stay for the rest of my life, though. I was wondering just today how long technology would take to break down and disappear, which in turn makes me wonder if we've been here before, some thousands of years ago.
That is the one thing that is strange about history, the past is compressed into a book or written record, and the last several hundred years (or even things that happened fifty years ago) are so disconnected from the present and the world that we find ourselves in today.
I often find my head spinning a little bit, struggling to accept that humanity has tens of thousands of years of history behind it, when we seem so vulnerable and young in the face of the more recent history (the last 200 years) compared to the entire span of human existence.
And perspective plays a big part as well. WWII is now part of taught history, but I never viewed it as history because people I grew up with (my grandparents and their friends) experienced it first hand. Yet when our teacher read us a story about the racial segregation in the US after the war it felt more like history because I knew no-one who'd experienced it. Then when you look back at historical records a period of a hundred years seems so small you forget that people at the start of a century would likely never have even been met by those at the end.
When I first came to Australia I felt that it didn't have much in the way of historical buildings compared to the UK, but then even in the UK many buildings pale in comparison to the ages of things like the pyramids. We're unearthing more and more things from different cultures across the world as well, that we used to assume were primitive.
Yet it all still seems completely disconnected from our world today, despite the fact that everything has brought us to this point.
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Wrong comment, that's mine