I tend to think in stories and the best ones inhabit me, so
as I learn more about the digital humanities—like the fish gaining heightened
awareness about the water in which he swims—one story resonates. In “Men areDifferent,” Alan Bloch (1963) writes about a robot archeologist—an android
indistinguishable from humans—who tells about the shared history of robots and
humans and then describes his trip to a faraway planet where he encountered a
man, the last one in the universe. This lonely man “had forgotten how to talk”
but with time, the robot and the man learned to communicate. One day the man
complained of heat so the robot, inferring that the man’s thermostats were
faulty, turned him off by piercing his neck—the same method used to switch off
a robot—but alas, he could not get him “running” again. Soon this last man
weathered away to bones. A classic science fiction foreboding, elements in
Bloch’s tale align with my expanding knowledge and experience of the digital
humanities and, as an educator, studying this field awakens within me an
urgency for ongoing education, new literacies, and collaboration to foster a
more humanistic future for our society. As MIT Scholars Burdick, et al, (2012)
ask, what does it mean to be a human being in the networked information age? (p.
vii). We had better find out.
Although written in the 1960s, Bloch’s story echoes our
current digital reality. Almost everyone on Earth (myself included) is in what
feels like an benign relationship with a smart device, yet the power dynamics are
not reciprocal. For example, corporations like Facebook use us puppet-like as
“unpaid labour” (Berry & Fagerjord, 2017, p. 16) as they mine our online
practices for consumer trends and patterns. Each ‘like’ is data for them and
dopamine for us. How did we end up here? Technology and virtual reality pioneer
Jaron Lanier (2011) cautions, “[i]t is time to take stock” (p. 19), time to
expose the ways technological tools have evolved (or not) and critically
examine their effects on crowd behaviours, finance, research, culture, even
spirituality: “the deep meaning of personhood is being reduced by illusions of
bits” (Lanier, p. 19-20). Technology is accelerating rapid social change in how
we shop, engage with text, communicate, even fall in love. Amidst the knowledge
and skills required to navigate this rapid change and their underlying
mechanisms, how do we reinforce humanistic pursuits?
Taking stock means assessing our current situation, getting
educated, and acting on it in ways that advance epistemology, reasoning, and
practices. Although Bloch’s story fancies that technological
determinism—powered by artificial intelligence toward a dangerous endgame—is
inevitable, our global society can still influence and positively alter our
future if we embrace means and methods that seek to enlighten our technological
paths and the information it produces. We can continue to simply consume slick
technology for convenience, escapism, trolling—whatever ‘feels’ we seek—or we
can use these tools to enable an alternative: “we have to think about the
digital layers we are laying down now in order to benefit future generations”
and address important issues including “global warming… new energy … wars…
aging populations …basic business” (Lanier, 2011, p. 36). There is much to understand
about the digital underpinnings at play in our technology; Humanities-based
literacies will play a significant role worldwide. Burdick, et al (2012),
propose that “Digital humanities may well function as a core curriculum for the
21st century” (p. 5), one where we join forces as global stakeholders in
advancing fundamental human rights and values. This is critical given our
current environment. With something as simple as basic digital citizenship we
have leaders tweeting about the size of their nuclear buttons.
In Bloch’s story the robot-archaeologist acts as an
historian yet his worldview is dangerously one-sided. By nature, archeology
requires digging. Digital humanities provide a means to ‘dig’ into Lanier’s
“layers” and “structures” inherent in both the sciences and the humanities.
Rosenbloom (2012) highlights a need for “a form of methodological pluralism in
which multiple methods may be necessary to increase our understanding of
individual domains” (p. 223). This requires a new collaboration between the
humanities and the sciences, a return to a basic founding principle of the
digital Information Age: “[the Internet itself] provided a new model of how
people could communicate with each other, [and] changed the nature of
collaboration” (Lenier, et al, 1997, p. 7). Digital Humanities scholars, Berry
& Fagerjord (2017) also emphasize renewed and new forms of collaboration to
facilitate “both the ‘hack’ aspect of knowing how to use computers in
humanities scholarship, and the ‘yack’ aspect of knowing how to think about
what it is we are doing” (p. 1). Lanier (2010) likewise illustrates the
associated negative outcomes of a lack of collective, thoughtful reflection on
how to use technology nobly: “I fear we are beginning to design ourselves to
suit digital models of us, and I worry about a leaching of empathy and humanity
in the process” (p. 39).
Bloch’s robot-archeologist, certainly lacked the necessary
empathy and humanity, thus the tragic outcome. The story evokes the discord
between “machine” and mankind, what Rosenbloom (2012) refers to as the “uneasy
relationship between science and the humanities” (p. 220). If Bloch’s robot
represents science, and pathos for the last man represents the absence of
humanities, Bloch’s climax implies that we must better understand our
technological tools and their impact or, through ignorance and entropy, aid our
downfall. It is necessary to infuse a humanistic worldview in our approach to
technology or like the fate of Bloch’s last man see our values “weather away.”
But how? Through education and new literacies that combine the sciences and the
humanities and through shared goals. Without it, we will remain like
intellectuals feasting at a dinner party, armed with only perfunctory knowledge
about our food’s origins and thus continue take our feast for granted.
In Bloch’s story the robot and the man had to learn to
communicate with each other. Assuming mankind created the robot, how did they
lose a common language? At some historical point, one might hypothesize they
evolved to form differing networks. Using his treatise on our networked society
in the Information Age, Castells (2000) might also propose that one network had
switched off another it deemed no-longer compatible (p. 22). Castells (2000)
notes that “there is little chance of social change within a given network” (p.
22) except “to challenge the network from the outside and in fact destroy it by
building an alternative network around alternative values” (p. 16). Indeed.
This is key to our current story too. If we develop an alternative network
founded on technical literacy combined with humanities principles—such as
wisdom, philosophy, reasoning—we can foster a new discourse, one founded in
critical thinking intent on using powerful technological tools for greater
social stewardship: “Digital_Humanities…envisages the present era as one of
exceptional promise for the renewal of humanistic scholarship and sets out to
demonstrate the contributions of contemporary humanities scholarship to new
modes of knowledge formation enabled by networked, digital environments.”
(Burdick, et al, 2012, p. 7).
Like Bloch’s story reveals, there is a current need to
reflect on unequal power dynamics and expose/examine the “switchers or
power-holders in our society (…connections between media and politics,
financial markets and technology, science and the military, and drug traffic
and global finance through money laundering)” (Castells, 2000, p. 16). In doing
so, we can expose this “human-made automaton” (Castells, 2000, p. 17) global
network currently shaping our society rather than the other way around. As
Lanier (2010) states, “someone who has been immersed in [our current] orthodoxy
[like a fish unaware of the water] needs to experience a figure-ground reversal
in order to gain perspective” (p. 23). I am most interested in Lanier’s (2010)
“alternative mental environment” (p. 26), with diverse perspectives not
composed of a mass of “people who are no longer acting like individuals” (p.
xiii). Digital humanities provide new ways to reflect on technology, media,
text, research, our values, our future. As an educator dedicated to advancing
learning, I recognize at the core of Bloch’s story the breakdown that enables a
technological dystopia: ignorance, sustained by apathy or exploited by greed. I
doubt Bloch’s notion of our bleak future; however, without education and new
literacies—without the combined ‘hack’ and ‘yack,’ we may not even recognize
what is human, if we are all thinking like Bloch’s robot.
References
Berry, D. & Fagerjord, A. (2017) On the way to
computational thinking. In Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a
Digital Age. Malden, MA: Polity. 1, 16.
Bloch, A. (1963). Men are Different. In Fifty Short Science
Fiction Tales. Asimov, I. & Conklin, G. (Eds.) Collier Books. USA.
Retrieved from http://www.gdhsenglish.com/thompson/assets/pdfs/ENG3U1%20pdf's/Short%20Stories/Men%20Are%20Different.pdf
Burdick, A., Drucker, J., Lunenfeld, P., Presner, T. &
Schnapp, J. (2012). Digital_Humanities. Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. vii, 5, 7.
Castells, M. (2000). Materials for an exploratory theory of
the network society. British Journal of Sociology. Vol. No. 51 Issue No. 1.
London School of Economics 2000. 16, 17, 22.
Lanier, J. (2010). You are not a Gadget. Vintage Books. New
York, NY. xiii, 19-20, 23, 26, 36, 39.
Lenier, B.M., et al. (1997). Brief History of the Internet.
Internet Society. 7. Retrieved from
https://www.internetsociety.org/internet/history-internet/brief-history-internet/
Rosenbloom, P. (2012). Toward a Conceptual
Framework for the Digital Humanities. In Digitial Humanities Quarterly, 6 (2).
220, 223. Retrieved from
http://ict.usc.edu/pubs/Towards%20a%20Conceptual%20Framework%20for%20Digital%20Humanities.pdf
