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DAVID GEIRINGER: Hello, I'm David Geiringer, a postdoctoral researcher and associate lecturer at Queen Mary's University of London. I'm not at Queen Mary's at the moment.

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I'm in my bedroom because I'm doing this in the context of the COVID lockdown. But I am a historian of social and cultural history in modern Britain.

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I'm particularly interested in histories of religion, gender, sexuality, and emotions. But more recently, I've been looking at the history of Britain in the 1990s.

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Well, recently there's been some really exciting research done on the history of Britain in the 1990s. But interestingly, the history of the 1990s has been relatively understudied compared to other decades.

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So by this point 10 years ago, the history of the 1980s had a rich and quite established historiography. And so part of my interest in it is in asking the question of why historians

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have been comparatively slow to look at this decade. There is then a sense in popular culture, but also a little bit within the academy, that the 1990s was something of a boring decade.

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They were perhaps less dramatic or less exciting than the class and cold wars of the 1980s, and then post-9/11 clash of civilizations and post-2008 economic collapse of the latter years.

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One particular BBC documentarist talked about the 1990s as a holiday from history, a period of serenity and calm and consensus sandwiched between these two eras of great dislocation and contest.

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So part of what my interest is in how people at the time thought about the times they were living in. So what did people in the '90s think of the '90s, think about what the '90s were and the moment of history that they were

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living through. Well, before we even get to the responses themselves from the observers, the questions that the Mass Observation Project organisers

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chose to ask their respondents are historically interesting in themselves. They give us something that historians can work with and insight into the priorities, the values,

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the things that mattered to people, or certainly mattered to sociological researchers, in the 1990s. And there's something interesting going on here.

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At the end of the 1980s, the Mass Observation Project commissioned a directive looking back on the 1980s, asking people to summarise and distill their views of the '80s. What was the '80s for you, it asked the observers.

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But interestingly, Mass Observation Project didn't ask its respondents to do that in the 1990s. So this, again, seemingly speaks to that idea that the 1990s, even in the 1990s, were beginning to be forgotten,

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or beginning to be marginalised, were somehow seen as less important or less significant as a category of time compared to other decades. So as well as learning things from what the Mass Observation

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Project didn't ask people, we can also learn something about how and what they did ask the respondents about. So they were very, very concerned, mass observers,

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with time and the way time was seemingly changing, or the way time was experienced appeared to be changing in the early '90s. So in 1992, it commissioned a directive

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called the pace of life. And the wording of the question asked here is very interesting. They asked the respondents, and I quote, "We often say that life is getting faster

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or that time flies as we get older. This directive is about the pace of life. Are you speeding up or slowing down?" So this is very much a leading question.

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It captures something of the belief that life is speeding up at this moment. And this is a very interesting idea for our current times. Of course, in a post-Brexit COVID world,

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there's an idea that time and history and events are happening at increasing pace, and that the way these ideas and events are being communicated through things like social media and through 24-hour news have changed the speed of time,

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have changed the way people experience time. But that idea actually existed back in the '90s, and probably before then as well. So maybe we should be cautious when thinking about

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the '90s as a decade of slow history, of a lack of news. So the Mass Observation Project is particularly useful for the historian interested in trying to understand how people thought about their own times

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because the respondents themselves often reflect on their own role in history and the way historians will think about their responses, but also the Mass Observation Project. So one respondent, when responding to the retrospective

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on the 1980s, said that "The whole essence of the '80s was probably crammed into the last few months because that is what future historians will emphasise in the '80s, the sudden breakup and rebellion of the hitherto and forcibly solid Soviet Bloc."

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So mass observers are already thinking about the way that their own interpretations of certain events and certain moments, and of history itself, will be thought of by historians in the future.

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Mass observers also interact and engage with the way the media represent certain moments and certain times. So one observer says that "It is easier to remember the end

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of the decade than beginning, as it was evident in the 'reviewing the decade' programmes put out by the media. Well, it's quite clear from the responses throughout the directives in the 1990s that people didn't believe themselves

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to be living through anything like a holiday from history. They actually believed they were living through history. They were living through very significant times. So one of the major events that people identified as epochal

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or something changing the way historical time was going to be understood for generations was the landslide election of Tony Blair's Labour government in 1997. Even before this, the idea of that victory

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was being seen as, in inverted commas, historical. So one respondent responded to a directive that the MOP sent out in 1996, asking respondents to write about a subject of their own choice.

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And in that response, he says that, "1996 is a little more than a week old as I begin to write. It looks like being at least as momentous as 1995. From what we have seen so far, it may well turn out to be

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a general election year in this country, and to see the end of Thatcherism and the return of a Labour government. How momentous an event that will prove to be."

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Truly historic. So the mid-1990s is seen as momentous, a great historical shift in the political culture, but also the political trajectory of Britain.

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So again, we assume that in this post-Brexit populist moment where there is a huge dichotomy and polarizations in our political culture, that things matter more, that history is happening faster and in a bigger way.

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But in the 1990s, there's a real sense that people also feel that what they are living through is historic, significant changes in our political culture. Another change in the 1990s, which is identified

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as revolutionary, as kind of changing the fabric of society and of the way people live their lives, is the introduction of the internet. And this is not always, though, welcomed as a positive change

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to people's lives. So a male that was born in the 1900s, so by this point, at least 90 years old, again responds to that directive on a subject of your own choice by talking about

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the significance of the internet. He writes, "The internet, as I vaguely understand it, is a method of calling up information from all over the world simply by punching the right keys

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into one's computer. Let us, say, require such information as the Tiddlywinks champion of 1905. Somebody, somewhere will have the answer,

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which thus saves the researcher thumbing through endless books, writing endless letters, seeking out endless people. Marvellous, of course. But this is information never to be confused with knowledge,

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which is about understanding brought about, as always, by dint of great personal effort and study. By accessing information in such a ready manner, we are breeding a race of computer morons,

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for what is the good of calling up senseless information all the time, without the backing of basic knowledge for what questions might be usefully posed." So here, this is a really interesting reflection

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on how the internet and how digital technologies are reshaping the way knowledge works and the way knowledge is organised, accessed, and I suppose the politics of knowledge itself.

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And again, this comfortably predates the emergence of social media and the anxieties which we see in our current culture about things, like the fake news and post-truth culture

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that we are apparently living through. So the 1990s, in many ways, was a precursor, but also the birth of many of these concerns, as well as the technologies which shape our modern

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understandings of how knowledge works. So the same respondent goes on to say, "Love of knowledge, probably never possessed by more than a few who lead the rest,

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will be replaced by love of information. Where, then, will the thinkers, say, of 50 years be hence? Whoever may read this in 2045 may have some further ideas. I will not live to discuss the matter further."

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So there's a sense that the internet is not just changing the way people communicate knowledge, but also the way knowledge is valued and understood. But also, as ever with the Mass Observation Project,

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we have to think about who it is that's writing this and who they represent. There are often behind these ideas and anxieties about knowledge changing, classed, gendered,

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and often racialized assumptions about which knowledge matters and which knowledge does not. So again, it gives us an insight into the hierarchies of knowledge and the way people value different kinds

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of knowledge and different ways of getting knowledge in the 1990s. Well, the Millennium is really interesting because unlike the 1990s, the Mass Observation Project was very interested

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in trying to get at people's understandings of what the Millennium meant. So they sent out actually three different directives over the course of the two or three years

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leading up to the Millennium that asked people to reflect on what the Millennium meant to them. They asked people to do a diary on the actual day, the 31st of December, 1999, and they asked for people's broader

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reflections on things like the Millennium Dome, Y2K, the Millennium bug, various features of this Millennium moment. And part of the reason I'm interested in the Millennium is

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because I think part of that idea of the 1990s being forgotten, the idea of the holiday from history, might be explained by the fact that the Millennium obscured the '90s.

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The Millennium was the bigger story, and it encouraged people to think about the past, the present, and the future in much longer ways. People looked past the 10 years to the years either side

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to the much longer trajectories of the century and the Millennium. So as early as 1997, the Mass Observation Project was asking its respondents what they thought of the Millennium.

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And generally, people didn't think much. Generally, there was a sense that this was a bit of a waste of space, and it was a commercial and politicised enterprise

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to distract people from real and meaningful issues. So it was described by one respondent as "a phoney event. No different from any other year," this respondent says. But despite this, I'm of the opinion

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that the Millennium does do something important to the way people think about the past, the present, and the future, the way they situate themselves in a historical story. So one respondent writes that "Thinking about the Millennium

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has sent my memory drifting back over the last 65 years and the very great changes that have taken place in that very short space of time. It is frightening."

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Another respondent says that, "Firstly, the boring bit, the dreaded Millennium, or rather the dreaded hype that surrounds it. I really don't have a lot of interest in the whole Millennium

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thing. I mean, it will still be the same on the 1st of January 2000 as it was on the 31st of December 1999." So one respondent, when asked about the Millennium,

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comments that, "when we consider the world wars, the hurricanes, the earthquakes, the countries that have been started, it's humbling to have ever got to this year, 2000. Do we appreciate it?

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Yes, mostly we do. The wonderful inventions in medicine that have helped to cure the sick, inventions that have connected us to the rest of the world--

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television, the internet, satellites, transport brought Europe for us here in England, modern inventions that lighten the load in the factory and the home, and the telephone now almost in every home in the land.

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Yes, it's a wonderful world that's been created in the 2,000 years." So here we have a counter to the pessimism, which tends to colour many of the mass observer's responses

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to the Millennium. But what's interesting and what's shared between those that are both optimistic and a little bit pessimistic about what the Millennium means,

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is that they're suddenly imagining history in blocks of either 2000 years or 100 years, the century. And I think these longer time periods, these longer imaginings of the past, but also the future,

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are really interesting to the 1990s and help us explain a little bit more about why historians have been slow to historicize, to interrogate, to study the '90s as its own period.