Thinking about the different ways we tell history to each other.
- A history of people. Biography, Pultarch’s Lives.
- A history of things. The telegraph, telephone, steam engine, computer.
A history of phenomenon. History of ideas: freedom, myth.
You can pick a topic and choose to tell it through one of the viewpoints. Listening In, on radio, a thing, tells the story as a phenomenon.
A book like iCon about Steve Jobs, tells the story of Apple through a person.
Where does the history of organizations fit on this spectrum?
Do we need a new form of history, a history of networks or systems?
Personally I find the history of phenomenon to be the most appealing. Perhaps that’s to be expected when a philosopher reads history.