lure of past Times and change in present POV
The Times newspaper opened their archive beginning with 1785 publications as a digital storage and made it for an introductory period freely accessible:
For any historical writer, the prospect of being able to search 200 years of The Times at the push of a button from anywhere in the world is both thrilling and slightly alarming: thrilling because there has never been a research tool quite like this before; alarming, because it is bound to unearth one’s own errors and omissions.
Even the most assiduous (or obsessed) biographer does not have time to scour every page of the world’s most famous newspaper for references to his subject. Even a historian utterly steeped in her subject cannot expect to have found every scrap of newspaper evidence relating to it.
Digitisation has changed all that. With every word published in The Times between 1785 and 1985 now accessible online, anyone, anywhere can search for a name, a subject, even a word, comprehensively and almost instantaneously. The same is true of other newspaper archives, but none has quite the scope of The Times. ... (read the entire article by Ben Macintyre)
... another access to news from a formerly for the west mostly disclosed point of view delivers Al Jazeera, which with its english outlet is also accessible to a western audience since 2006.
Al Jazeera English just recently
won a price for the “Best 24 Hour News Programme”.
... The Award recognized Al Jazeera English’s extensive international reach and efforts to dig deeper to give its international audience a richer understanding of the events that affect their lives. Al Jazeera English beat entries from
BBC News, Sky News, Lisboa TV and the Phoenix Satellite Television Company to take home the award. ... (
read on)
... between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there. (Heterotopias, M.Foucault, 1967)
