Semi-Defense of My “Non-Tech” Colleagues
There's a not so hidden annoyance on the part of scholars engaged with digital media at the backwardness of many academic humanists. It's a sentiment that sometimes appears on the techrhet listserv, and some recent posts (and threads) by both Timothy Burke and Geeky Mom dance around this annoyance.
In large measure I agree that humanists can and should learn more about and use developing communication technologies. But I do think we need some perspective on the uses of old-fashioned-ness, especially with respect to humanism.
Adopting new communication technologies inevitably entails loss. I wish we had managed to preserve more of the culture of oral disputation from medieval universities (minus the silly cantankerousness it often encouraged.) Those who look backwards and criticize, from Socrates to Sven Birkerts, provide an important function. They help us to recognize what we are losing and ask what and how some of that might be preserved. I don't think it's generally recognized how much even current educational practice reveals our affinities with Socrates' criticism of writing in the Phaedrus. We still, as part of our educational process, get people together in face to face meetings and talk, often about pieces of writing. (I might want to argue that what we do when talking about texts is just a kind of technical training, showing people to use the technology of writing, but that's a subject for another day.)
In the process of adopting new technologies, how much room is there for human agency? I think, for instance, about Howard Reingold's fairly well-known article on the Amish from Wired. Here is a community where people think carefully about the effects introducing new technologies will have on their social life and make decisions about what to use. Too often we treat newer technologies and the worlds they call into being as inevitable. What decisions can we make, as individuals or as groups, and what are the consequences of those decisions? How can we ask these questions without seeming simplistically pro or con? In some ways, the recalcitrant and the blithely ignorant have the most to teach us as we continue to consider how to integrate these technologies into teaching.
Let me try to put this another way. All current academic humanists are remarkably sophisticated users of a technology: print. Indeed, writing itself is a technology. The techne of writing requires not only learning to encode and decode the alphabet. Even more, it involves learning to put a dialectic (people talking with/against each other) into a "monolectic" medium, and then somehow to reawaken its dialectic origins, even in the mind as reading. Writing and reading in general are much more deeply rhetorical technologies than is usually recognized, even among those who understand literacy's fundamental rhetorical structure.
Most of the blogs I read are imbued with print literacy. The best pieces are really essays, not all that different from what Montaigne and Bacon wrote. They are based in the same process of somehow mashing dialectic into the monolectic medium. And, I also hope that humanists continue to train readers who will be able, and even want, to read such things as essayistic blog posts and other "long-form" pieces. Burke, in this thread, alludes to a presentation from Kathleen Fitzpatrick that asked questions about “how to do 'long-form' scholarly work in digital environments that isn’t just an attempt to translate the book or codex into those environments, but is net-native in some respect .” Such activity requires readers who would still want (and be able) to read long form works as a basic condition. But that's an assumption. I'd guess that not many people today could follow a 14th-century disputation, because we don't have the same kind of knowledge about oral arguments and Aristotleian logic that was de rigueur for the university educated then. “Long-form” literacy could very well be lost as communication media develop in the direction of presenting everything short-form. I take this as part of what Burke means when he calls “complete hooey” much of the talk of current students being digital natives. They aren't long-form digital natives.
All this said, I agree that academic humanists often miss the boat right now. And because campus humanists often remain embedded in print culture as we move into the digital future, we don't exercise enough power, on campuses, over the direction IT takes. We ought to be leaders in this regard. But I think a large part of what we have to offer is specifically thinking about ways to use these newer technologies of the word to preserve the goal of promoting just the kind of understanding that Socrates lamented would be lost with writing.
In large measure I agree that humanists can and should learn more about and use developing communication technologies. But I do think we need some perspective on the uses of old-fashioned-ness, especially with respect to humanism.
Adopting new communication technologies inevitably entails loss. I wish we had managed to preserve more of the culture of oral disputation from medieval universities (minus the silly cantankerousness it often encouraged.) Those who look backwards and criticize, from Socrates to Sven Birkerts, provide an important function. They help us to recognize what we are losing and ask what and how some of that might be preserved. I don't think it's generally recognized how much even current educational practice reveals our affinities with Socrates' criticism of writing in the Phaedrus. We still, as part of our educational process, get people together in face to face meetings and talk, often about pieces of writing. (I might want to argue that what we do when talking about texts is just a kind of technical training, showing people to use the technology of writing, but that's a subject for another day.)
In the process of adopting new technologies, how much room is there for human agency? I think, for instance, about Howard Reingold's fairly well-known article on the Amish from Wired. Here is a community where people think carefully about the effects introducing new technologies will have on their social life and make decisions about what to use. Too often we treat newer technologies and the worlds they call into being as inevitable. What decisions can we make, as individuals or as groups, and what are the consequences of those decisions? How can we ask these questions without seeming simplistically pro or con? In some ways, the recalcitrant and the blithely ignorant have the most to teach us as we continue to consider how to integrate these technologies into teaching.
Let me try to put this another way. All current academic humanists are remarkably sophisticated users of a technology: print. Indeed, writing itself is a technology. The techne of writing requires not only learning to encode and decode the alphabet. Even more, it involves learning to put a dialectic (people talking with/against each other) into a "monolectic" medium, and then somehow to reawaken its dialectic origins, even in the mind as reading. Writing and reading in general are much more deeply rhetorical technologies than is usually recognized, even among those who understand literacy's fundamental rhetorical structure.
Most of the blogs I read are imbued with print literacy. The best pieces are really essays, not all that different from what Montaigne and Bacon wrote. They are based in the same process of somehow mashing dialectic into the monolectic medium. And, I also hope that humanists continue to train readers who will be able, and even want, to read such things as essayistic blog posts and other "long-form" pieces. Burke, in this thread, alludes to a presentation from Kathleen Fitzpatrick that asked questions about “how to do 'long-form' scholarly work in digital environments that isn’t just an attempt to translate the book or codex into those environments, but is net-native in some respect .” Such activity requires readers who would still want (and be able) to read long form works as a basic condition. But that's an assumption. I'd guess that not many people today could follow a 14th-century disputation, because we don't have the same kind of knowledge about oral arguments and Aristotleian logic that was de rigueur for the university educated then. “Long-form” literacy could very well be lost as communication media develop in the direction of presenting everything short-form. I take this as part of what Burke means when he calls “complete hooey” much of the talk of current students being digital natives. They aren't long-form digital natives.
All this said, I agree that academic humanists often miss the boat right now. And because campus humanists often remain embedded in print culture as we move into the digital future, we don't exercise enough power, on campuses, over the direction IT takes. We ought to be leaders in this regard. But I think a large part of what we have to offer is specifically thinking about ways to use these newer technologies of the word to preserve the goal of promoting just the kind of understanding that Socrates lamented would be lost with writing.
posted by Erasmus | 1:36 AM
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