That Was Then This Is Now

Hi, Peter Ricchiuti here, I have three questions for you. One – What are your parents’ names? You can probably answer that easily. Two – What are your grandparents’ names? You can probably answer that as well. Now here’s the third question. What are the names of your great grandparents? Do you know? Off the top of your head…

Peter Ricchiuti hosts Out to Lunch at Columns on St. Charles Avenue in Uptown New Orleans

This is not a scientific survey, but I’ve asked enough people this question to be fairly confident that most people cannot tell you the names of their great grandparents. It doesn’t take very long for us to lose track of our history. And that’s just in our own family.

For something as complex and large as the City of New Orleans, we have a repository of our collective memory. It’s called the Historic New Orleans Collection. It opened its doors as a small museum in the French Quarter in 1970. Today, under the current leadership of President and CEO Daniel Hammer, HNOC has grown to 14 historic buildings spread over 3 blocks in the Quarter. It houses over 1 million artefacts, it publishes books, and a quarterly magazine.

Daniel Hammer, President and CEO of The Historic New Orleans Collection, the repository of the city’s collective memory

When you go to a transportation museum, you see cars, boats, and planes. When you go to a music museum, you see musical instruments and hear songs. When you go to a history museum, you can’t actuallysee history. What you do see is representations of history, usually in the form of documents and photographs.

History is a retrospective ordering of what were at one point live events. Museums of the future will be able to display historical events of today as they happened in real time – in the form of video. Not only do we record and post countless hours of human activity on video, we also live stream it.

If you’d like to see human history being made right now, from pretty much any place in the world, you can do that, at a website or app called Who’s Live.

Nate Verhoeven, Founder of Who’s Live, a website and app that’s an aggregator of every live streaming feed in the world that’s happening right now

Who’s Live is an aggregator of live streaming video from around the world and across the country, categorized into sections like News, Sports, Education, Gaming, and many more. There is literally something for everyone, 24 hours a day, on Who’s Live. And it’s the brainchild of New Orleanian, Nate Voerhoeven.

When someone tells you, “That was then but this is now,” it’s generally not good. It’s typically a shorthand way of saying, “Things have changed and you need to keep up.” But, when you think about it, “Then” and “Now” is all we’ve got. As far back as The New Testament, we’re warned that we’re not promised tomorrow. So we need to make the most of the present moment.

There’s probably nobody on earth who is doing more than Nate Verhoeven to channel every human current event into a single present moment. And there’s nobody in New Orleans doing more than Daniel Hammer to preserve the most significant of those events for future generations.