It seems digital media didn’t deeply change the theory of public history.

Whether it’s online or

not, it’s still history for non specialists, intended for a large audience. The real transformation in my
opinion is in the practice of public history.
First of all, digital media, thanks to their accessibility, can reach a large audience and bring new
kinds of public, especially a younger audience through social medias like Tik Tok or YouTube.
Besides, online media allow interaction and dialogue. Individuals and communities can share
information, react and give feedback. Historians and the audience can enter into dialogue. So,
digital media forces public historians to spend more time and attention on communication channels
and methods.
In fact, digital media offers new formats for sharing historical content. Tik Tok, for example. Tik
Tok is a short-form video hosting service. This platform is more and more used for sharing
historical content. But the really short length of these videos forces public historians to adapt their
speech. They have to be concise and they have to accept that they can’t say everything about a
specific subject.
Finally, social medias make every user a potential historian. Public historians on digital media are
often not academics but people passionate about history. Nota Bene, for example, is a french
YouTuber who makes videos about history but he didn’t pursue studies in history. Yet his historical
content achieves great success, like a lot of other popularization history channels on YouTube.

Public historians are not done with the Internet as a new field for history. The potential of digital
media for public history is not fully realized. Actually, in the future, more historians from university
could take on this digital history. Online media are very useful tools to share historical content and
reach new audiences. A future digital public history could be a public history made by more
historians and academics. Because even if it’s great that everyone can share historical content, this
leads to a gulf between sources and historical interpretation or people telling historical errors that
are mistaken for true. Academics and people passionate for history could also enter into dialogue in
order to make a quality historical content online, each one bringing his capacities into the work.