Preliminary Rearch Proposal

New Media and Sensorial Time Travel – New media as a whole has created a myriad of options for keeping abreast of current issues and news stories, but what of its arguably inadvertent development as an archival depository for sights, sounds, and events of the past?  My research proposal would examine the question of whether we are as likely, or possibly more likely, to use new media as a conduit for indulging our inner time traveler as for creating awareness of the present.  The hypothesis backing such research is that we, as humans, have an innate, sometimes nostalgia-fed desire to experience sensorial stimuli from our youth, or possibly from a point in time prior to individual existence and consciousness of such stimuli because of its unfamiliarity.  New media has become a provider for this type of “time traveling,” utilizing older, traditional media to provide a connecting point in a fashion similar to a wormhole in theoretical physics.  The research would evaluate the likelihood of a new media user to go back in time versus dwelling in the present time with regard to online content.

Here is an example of the concept provided by Rebecca J. Rosen:

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/10/a-guy-who-saw-lincoln-get-shot-was-on-a-tv-show-in-1956-that-is-now-on-youtube/263800/

Blog author Jason Kottke has come up with the term “human wormholes” to describe the underlying phenomenon of human experience compressing seemingly large spans of time:

http://kottke.org/12/01/human-wormholes-and-the-great-span