History in public space: problems and prospects for development

Davydov V.

The article attempts to analyse the peculiarities of the perception of history in public space and the consequences of random or purposefully generated modifications of historical facts arising from such perception, as well as to determine the further direction of the development of such a phenomenon as public history. By entering a broad public space, scientific historical knowledge, like any other information, is able to undergo certain distortions in it, up to the point that individual historical facts can be reborn in contrast, eliminated at all, or replaced by new, completely mythical representations. Oddly enough, the development of information technologies and ubiquitous digitalization, which provide almost unhindered access to information, including digitized original sources of historical knowledge, scientific works of historians and other artifacts and documents, not only did not reduce the degree of distortion of the perception of historical facts in public space, but on the contrary — strengthened it, and even became a tool of deliberate modification of historical knowledge.

Keywords:public history, theory, history, knowledge, digital society and modification of data, distortion of facts, perception of historical facts.