New Media and the Future of the Humanities

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Michele S. Shauf

Georgia Institute of Technology

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. . . If the humanities are to have a future in the techno-scientific age, they must begin by resisting technology. I do not employ "resistance" in a political sense, meaning "opposition," because that would constitute an untenable neo-Luddism. Frankly there is little point in opposing technology. We’re all of us too beguiled by the new economy it has created in which a company can lose hundreds of millions of dollars a year while spawning rich men like jack rabbits. But we might find great reward in engagements with technology that set their own beats, determined alternatives to the breakneck speed of Moore’s law. So the sense in which I use "resistance" pulls from physical science -- perhaps also from love poems -- and means something like "friction" or "a medium through which a current must travel" or "a slowing down."

. . . There is, of course, a paradoxical relationship between the humanities and emerging information technologies, especially multi-sequential and interactive multimedia. On the one hand, new media technology threatens to relegate the humanities to "distance learning environments" designed by star professors but actually taught via email correspondence by adjuncts. On the other hand, these same technologies represent an opportunity for the humanities to reassert the relevance of art, literature, history, and philosophy in technological culture by bringing their insights and practices to bear on new media design. How the humanities will fair will be determined, in my view, by the vocabulary allowed to dominate discussions about how media other than writing should be integrated into humanities curricula.

. . . First, some observations about the current state of this vocabulary.

. . . This semester I am teaching an undergraduate class in photography. A critical survey, the course explores photography both as a medium and as a cognitive frame. We say, in other words, that in addition to taking photographs it is possible to see and act photographically. And if it is possible to see and act photographically then it is also possible to think photographically. And if it is possible to think photographically then it ought to be possible to develop a photographic style which may be expressed in a variety of media. In writing, for example.

. . . Early on, the class was able to dispense with photography’s PR problem, its habit of prevarication and finally tenuous, at best, relation to reality. The reason we were able to dispense with this problem early in the semester is, of course, that no one believes it anyway. This is just one of the medium’s many fine equivocations: we know it isn’t a court transcript and yet we wish ever so much that it was. What was more difficult was setting each student on an idiosyncratic track toward discovering -- that is, inventing -- a photographic style. (I won’t go into detail here but suffice it to say that one of the things a humanist pedagogy can do is teach style as an integral, not a feminine add-on, to learning. Style is what turns a thinker into a writer, for instance, a woman with a camera into a photographer.)

. . . To encourage a writing style that performed a photographic aesthetic, I engaged the class in some distinctions between the essay and the article as literary genres. Talented Georgia Tech undergraduates, my students are impressively skillful with the article style (the voice of no voice), so it seemed that with some practice they could also skillfully cultivate other, more audible writing voices. The idea is taking, but it was initially quite difficult for students to grasp the idea of stylization. One class discussion stands out in particular. The students had already read two collections of essays -- Sontag’s On Photography and Trow’s Within the Context of No Context -- and I was playing Socrates: "If these are examples of the essay, then what are some characteristics of the essay as a genre," that sort of thing. I was plainly making little headway, so a student in facilitator mode tried to help. "Can you just tell us the functionality of the essay?" he asked.

. . . If you are unfamiliar with "functionality," it is a programmer’s word, and it’s a good one in the context of computer programming because the slightest oversight -- failing to declare a global variable, let’s say, before a string of code that will assign various values or words to variable x -- might result in zero functionality. Your code won’t work. What’s interesting, then, about functionality is that the difference between none and 100% could be a mere keystroke or two, an omitted "if" in a crucial if-then statement.

. . . Plainly, "functionality" makes no sense in the context of the essay. Misplaced semi-colons and badly worded phrases hack away at an essay’s felicitousness and hence effectiveness, true enough, and certainly there is a breaking point. As everyone who has taught even a single writing class knows, error and vacuity can eventually overtake prose and turn it into mere noise. Nonetheless, it is quite absurd to speak of writing in terms of computer programming, but that is precisely what students well versed in technical vocabularies, and deficient in humanist ones, are inclined to do.

. . . A second observation.

. . . Shopping around for suitable texts for my photography class, I noticed a curious structure to many media anthologies. The narrative arc, reminiscent of old movie shorts, might be called "The March of Time." In the beginning was the ideologically suspect linear perspective, which was mechanized in photography, then found its moving groove in film, which in turn was democratized in video. This entire supersession, the narrative concludes, might be condensed into a single "before" and understood as a prelude to new media, the condition to which all media aspires. In the context of a humanist approach to media, this narrative makes no sense. In the context of a technologist approach to new media, by contrast, it makes just as much sense as arguing that techniques of bridge building developed in the 1980s supersede the way bridges were built in the 1930s. This is because technologists view media in terms of specific logics or "affordances" by which they are employed to their fullest potential. Such a view of photography, to pose one example, understands the camera as a mechanical means for stopping time. It therefore values the stop-motion images of Lartigue and Muybridge as technically mature photographs, and finds little of interest in the work of Arbus or Eggleston or any number of other photographers unconcerned with motion.

. . . To further explain the notion of affordances, an artifact, an ad for 3D software from November’s Wired magazine. The copy reads: "Think about it. If you’re using photos on your website, you’re using a holdover from the 19th century. It doesn’t make any sense, does it?"

. . . It is impossible to see, from a humanist perspective, that photography "wants to be" film or that video is finally "fulfilled" in 360 degree x 360 degree x 360 degree space.

. . . A final observation.

. . . I am using David Siegel’s book in my graduate web design class this semester. As you may know, Siegel is a premiere web designer and is responsible for the generational distinction so often used in the evaluation of web sites. According to Siegel, first generation web sites, typical five or six years ago but now hopelessly passé, are almost entirely textual, with strategically placed horizontal rules to break-up each page. Second generation sites go beyond simple graphics and text to include illustrations and photographs, and third generation sites, the most technically sophisticated, go even farther. Third generation sites use visually animated metaphors to construct information architectures and include introductory or "splash" screens. What they don’t do, ever, is use horizontal rules. Horizontal rules being, so, over.

. . . What’s curious about this model is that anyone interested in design should know nothing is ever over. Designers are always looking to the past for ideas, to the Christian Dior of the 1950s or to Sung Dynasty painting from eighth-century China or to Depression-era glass. In saying third generation sites "go beyond" text and graphics as logical cues, Siegiel cannot, then, be speaking as a designer but as a technologist. The technologist speaks of moving "beyond" a defined set of technical problems or constraints, which makes fine sense in the technologist’s vocabulary, although it has profound implications for everyone else. One result of thinking "beyond" is increasingly complex software applications that can make even typesetting an outline a maddening affair.

. . . Talking about vocabularies and ways of talking is tricky, maybe suspect, possibly even futile since the twentieth century has been largely about exposing the absence of foundational vocabularies. I want to be very clear that I’m no minister of culture bemoaning the adulteration of lexicons and in principle I think interdisciplinary borrowings are a good idea. New media certainly should not be described from a single frame of reference, but the humanities must insist upon the primacy of the humanist vocabulary as we redefine our role in technoculture. Asserting "the primacy of the humanist vocabulary" constitutes the core strategy of technoresistance and it means "this is the vocabulary we will use." It does not mean, "this is the only vocabulary capable of describing the world."

. . . Because technology gives rise to new media, new media comes predisposed to certain ways of talking germane to the technologist’s work. The problem with this built-in vocabulary is that it reads chronologies as advancements, which is rather anathema to the humanist point of view. Indeed, one way to describe the humanities would be to say that it is the record of human attempts to address problems in which no advance whatever has been made. What is good, why is death the truest and the falsest thing, where is beauty, what is just, how has history made us -- surely these are problems quite unlike the problems of bridge building or processor speed if only because we can be sure that our current answers may not, in the long run, represent progress over Plato’s answer or Woolf’s answer or Satie’s answer or Sei Shonagon’s answer. In truth, some humanists do apply the word "beyond" in their thinking, but, except for those who still see art and literature and history and philosophy as a series of patricides, they are referring to certain preferences -- aesthetic, intellectual, perhaps psychological or existential. In its reluctance to use "beyond," and its general insistence that the word must be acknowledged as a subjective frame -- the humanities speaks differently.

. . . What would distinguish a humanities-based approach to new media would be precisely the refusal to be seduced by cutting-edge technology.

And being seduced by cutting-edge technology amounts to this: the humanities finally admitting the irrelevance of its vocabulary and capitulating to the "go beyond" vocabulary of technology. As educators we don’t much need to cultivate technological ambitions in our students; they seem to have the loftiest of technical aims. What we can do -- and this is our unique purview -- is foster carefully considered conceptual, aesthetic, and ethical ambitions in our students so they are continually asking, as we do, what lies beyond "beyond." This is a question that needs to be posed relentlessly, as evidenced by the strange narrowness of purpose to which new media has so far been put. As we all know, the most successful examples of new media, in terms of exposure and impact, are the Amazon.com web site and Myst. (If you prefer, substitute your favorite e-commerce site and game.) These are natural enough products to come out of a culture of perpetual adolescence buoyed by unprecedented prosperity, and they have been fast answers, six years out of the box. If retail and kids’ entertainment are the obvious technological answers to the question of how multimedia might be used and to what end, then the humanist vocabulary has enormous contributions to make in the design of new media artifacts.

. . . What this situation suggests is that as our technological means proliferate, we experience increasing difficulty in assigning to them any but the most pedestrian ends. One way to address this problem is to open humanities classes, which traditionally inculcate real discursive ambition, to media other than writing. Students should be allowed, in other words, to submit videos, photo-essays, web sites, and stand-alone multimedia rather than papers to complete course requirements. Several questions obviously emerge.

. . . Who will assist these students with their technical problems? The answer is no one. Indeed one of the main goals of this pedagogy is to circumscribe the time students spend on technical issues so they will concentrate on ideas and arguments. It is important to acknowledge that integrating technology into the humanities classroom is always a zero sum game. The more time technological means are allotted, the less time humanist ends are attended to. If a student is unfamiliar with scanning techniques, she should not incorporate photographs into her web page. If a student does not have access to editing software, his video should be edited in the camera. If a student has no experience with these alternative media, she should work in writing. There is no more need for humanities instructors to teach technical skills today than it was in the 1980s to teach word processing software.

. . . How will student work be evaluated? Exactly the same way it is now: according to the insight of its argument, the thoroughness of its research, and the grace of its style. This is precisely the way the humanities can radicalize new media, by holding it to the conventions of university-level discourse. It is not likely, of course, that students will immediately be able to craft a "video essay" that does the rhetorical work of the research paper. They may turn to hybrid projects that, for example, annotate a paper with a video or supplement a video with a paper.

. . . Why not continue to relegate new media practice to "production" courses in multimedia or web-based design? Such courses are, by definition, driven by the technologist’s "beyond" vocabulary, and their objective is to train students how to color correct images, balance layouts, draw flowcharts for multisequential environments, and simulate interactivity with JavaScript, Lingo or another scripting language. Because even rudimentary web design requires facility with at least two applications, and because these applications are upgraded with such frequency, the production class cannot possibly address what have come to be known as content issues. "Substance" might be a better word.

. . . The pragmatic results of opening humanities courses to alternative media could be numerous. University administrators applaud any and every use of technology and would likely welcome new strategies for attracting students to humanities programs with depressed enrollments. Humanities students would enjoy a grounding in the history of ideas and practice in multiple media, which ought to mean that they can pursue academic or industry goals with equal vigor. And graduate study in the humanities would no longer mean job training for a diminishing professorate, but an intellectually rich environment suited for diverse and individualized aims.