The
pervasive penetration of modern technology is now extending into areas of human
life that one would never have associated with modern technology. I have talked in the past of the importance
of protecting the humanities both in school and in one’s daily life as a
protection against the malign influences of technology that lead to people
becoming robotized. But perhaps I was
wrong in my assessment of the protection that the humanities could offer. There is a whole new area of study that has
been developing for some time that I admit I was not aware of. The area is called digital humanities and,
although there are many different definitions that attempt to explain it, a
simple description of it would be the intersection of computer processes with
humanities subject matter. Computers are
used to sort out, to archive and to curate the humanities.
It
sounds harmless enough. An attempt, if
nothing else, to use digital connectedness to organize humanities scholarship
and to perhaps find interesting statistical juxtapositions to help with new
interpretations of different creative works.
But I believe that the input of computer processes on humanities
material may have a dark side. And this
relates to how we will experience works in the humanities after they become
configured to fit into computer processes and categories.
So
what is the nature of this subtle transformation of humanities works by digital
computer processes? Before I proceed
with this analysis, it may be appropriate to review some of the categories for
philosophical phenomena that have been developed in this column. Something is a figure if it has defined
boundaries and does not blend with the phenomena around it. Any single thing like a hammer, a spoon, or a
house can qualify as a figure. Something
is ground or grounding to the extent that it has more indeterminate boundaries
and is, in fact, capable of blending or blurring together with the phenomena
around it. Bodies of water, forests and
jungles are all examples of ground. And
something is a vacuum to the extent that it exists in the spaces between figure
and figure, between figure and ground, and between ground and ground. A dark room that is totally closed off from
all light is an example of a visual vacuum.
So is outer space, even though it has figures like suns, planets, moons,
asteroids and comets floating in it. A phenomenon can actually have different
combinations of these three categories and, as a result, produce different
configurations of stimuli. Corresponding
to the three basic categories of phenomena, there are three basic categories of
stimuli that emanate from them. Defined
discrete stimuli emanate from figures or figure aspects of phenomena. These are stimuli that have a bounded
beginning and a bounded ending either temporally or spatially. A flashing light and a staccato musical note
are examples of this. Flowing blendable
continual stimuli emanate from grounding and ground aspects of phenomena. These are stimuli that have a blurry
beginning and a blurry ending. A wave on
an ocean and a legato musical note are examples of this. Finally, infinite continuous stimuli emanate
from vacuum or vacuum aspects of a phenomenon.
The darkness in a dark room with no light, or the hum in a room with
total silence are examples of this.
So
how do we apply all these categories to our discussion of the subtle
transformation of the humanities by digital technology? We can start by saying that technology
highlights some aspects of humanities works that weren’t as noticed before. To the extent that digital technology helps us
to look at patterns in, among other things, words, phrases or the mention of
different subjects, it means we are more focused on different focused fragments
of these works, different mini-figures with their defined discrete
stimuli. From these fragments or pieces that
are examined, sharp abstracted structures of ideas are created that become
separated from the grounding, the contexts of symbolic meanings in which the
work under consideration exists. Formal
statistical analysis displaces creative intuitive understanding for
apprehending and understanding the works.
It is as if the work turns into a ream of ideational data rather than
remaining the organically created work that it was meant to be.
To
the extent that this happens, emotions, immediate sensations and deep intuitive
meanings are diminished in their role for apprehending and understanding the
work. And this tendency is reinforced to
the extent that a lot of time is spent on a work in its role as a file in an
archive or more than one archive. As a
work in an archive, a work in the humanities becomes a large figure datum that
gets shuffled in with other large data, other works in the humanities, all of
which are subsumed under the larger rubric of reams of humanities data that
become one more subject to be catalogued in the digital world. What becomes a matter of concern is that in
studying works in the humanities, the computer processes involved in archiving
them or in deconstructing works in order to find patterns and comparisons of
different pieces or pixels of the works, lead to the diminishing in importance
of the intuitive understanding of the flowing blendable continual organic whole
of each of the works.
We no
longer have mindsets that are easily predisposed to global understanding of
phenomena, to the flow of symbols and icons, where parts are looked at in so
far as how they represent or are bonded with the whole. We have become trained to look at the
phenomena in our world as defined discrete categories, as free floating
figures, maybe sometimes connected to each other, but ultimately flowing in a
vacuum. There are so many categories like
this in our world, and the way we find to most easily handle them is to sort
them into archives and statistical patterns.
And what makes it so easy for us to deal with material as sorted
categories is that we are becoming, in effect, sorted categories
ourselves. We are becoming hardened, overly
defined, discrete, robotic creatures who are losing touch with the flowing
coherence of our own organic senses of self.
The
fact that even an area of our mental life - the humanities - that would seem
among the least susceptible to becoming mechanized is being organized into
defined discrete logically connected categories says a great deal about the
extent to which technology is impacting our lives. The humanities were supposed to be one of the
last bastions where a large dose of logical organization and statistical
studies with data were going to be off limits.
The humanities were supposed to be a mental place where one engaged in
creative intuitive symbolic thinking with lots of flowing blendable continual
stimuli to shape our thought processes and our thought content. But with computers, tablets and smartphones,
more mechanical thinking filled with a lot of free-floating data is now
penetrating areas of thought that deal with more creative humanistic concerns.
It
means that little is safe anymore from the expanding influence of modern
technology and that modern technology, by permeating so many different areas of
our lives, has the opportunity gradually, incrementally to transform our very
essence as human beings.
(c) 2016 Laurence Mesirow
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