# digital humanities and digital media

conversations on politics, culture, aesthetics, and literacy

roberto simanowski

### **Digital Humanities and Digital Media**

Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

## **Fibreculture Books**

Series Editor: Andrew Murphie Title Editor: Athina Karatzogianni

Digital and networked media are now very much the established media. They still hold the promise of a new world, but sometimes this new world looks as much like a complex form of neofeudalism as a celebration of a new communality. In such a situation the question of what 'media' or 'communications' are has become strange to us. It demands new ways of thinking about fundamental conceptions and ecologies of practice. This calls for something that traditional media disciplines, even 'new media' disciplines, cannot always provide. The Fibreculture book series explores this contemporary state of things and asks what comes next.

### **Digital Humanities and Digital Media**

Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy

Roberto Simanowski

# OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

*London 2016*

First edition published by Open Humanities Press 2016

Copyright © 2016 Roberto Simanowski and respective contributors Freely available online at http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/ digital-humanities-and-digital-media/

This is an open access book, licensed under Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike license. Under this license, authors allow anyone to download, reuse, reprint, modify, distribute, and/or copy their work so long as the authors and source are cited and resulting derivative works are licensed under the same or similar license. No permission is required from the authors or the publisher. Statutory fair use and other rights are in no way affected by the above.

Read more about the license at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0

The cover image is a visualization of the book's text. Each interview was algorithmically assessed, paragraph by paragraph, for relevance to "politics", "culture", "aesthetics" and "literacy" and the result plotted as a streamgraph. All of the streamgraphs were overlayed to create a composite image of the book. Made with Gensim and Matplotlib. © David Ottina 2016 cc-by-sa

PRINT ISBN 978-1-78542-030-6 PDF ISBN 978-1-78542-031-3

OPEN HUMANITIES PRESS

Open Humanities Press is an international, scholar-led open access publishing collective whose mission is to make leading works of contemporary critical thought freely available worldwide.

More at: http://openhumanitiespress.org

## **Contents**

**Introduction** | Roberto Simanowski 9

1. **Johanna Drucker** | At the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities 43

*Johanna welcomes governmental regulation on the internet against 'neoliberal entrepreneurialism,' rejects new grand narratives 'reconfigured by the pseudo-authority of computation' and considers the sociality of contemporary existence an obstacle for 'interior life,' innovation, and zoophilia. She compares Digital Humanities with the 'cook in the kitchen' and Digital Media Studies with the 'restaurant critic,' sees the platform and tool development in the Humanities as a professional, not academic track, she calls for a visual epistemology in times of Screen culture and diagrammatic knowledge production and she explains how to contaminate the world of quantitative and disambiguating underpinnings with the virtues of relativism and multi-perspectivism.*

2. **John Cayley** | Of Capta, vectoralists, reading and the Googlization of universities 69

*John Cayley positions 'capta' against 'data', reveals vectoralization as algorithmic determination within a new socioeconomic architecture, bemoans the blackmail of 'terms of service' as well as the infantile misunderstanding of what it is to be a social human by Mark Zuckerberg and the serfdom of narcissistic selves to the data-greedy service providers. He underlines the dumbness and deception of statistics and algorithmic agency, wonders when the vectoralist class of big software will, eventually, be 'too big to fail,' speculates about unrealized artworks with Google Translate, rejects "social reading" and fears Digital Humanities.*

3. **Erick Felinto** | Mediascape, antropotechnics, culture of presence, and the flight from God 93

*Erick Felinto addresses the growing digital illiteracy compared to times before graphical user interface and calls, with Vilém Flusser, the hacker the actual educational ideal of our time. He discusses the enthusiasm and misconceptions in early net culture discourse, sees 'speculative futurism' and 'theoretical fictions' as the discursive strategy of tomorrow, considers technology as an 'uncanny form of life' and inevitable correction to the dictate of nature, explains the different concepts of posthumanism, and questions that (human) life is necessarily the ultimate goal of the cosmos. He explores the dialectic of silence and phatic communication in new media in the context of a general shift from the 'culture of meaning' to a 'culture of presence' and the exhaustion of the interpretative paradigm in the Humanities.*

4. **David Golumbia** | Computerization always promotes centralization even as it promotes decentralization 123

*David Golumbia presents four reasons why he considers "hacker" groups such as Anonymous right-wing activism, states that in the regime of computation today the mathematical rationalism of Leibnitz has prevailed Voltaire's critical rationalism, and proposes a FDA for computer technology. He doesn't see the Internet as Habermasian "public sphere," considers Digital Humanities a 'perfect cyberlibertarian construct,' bemoans the capitulation of universities to new media corporations, and calls for a balance of both modes of thinking, the hedgehog and the fox, in the digital age.*

5. **Ulrik Ekman** | Network Societies 2.0: The extension of computing into the social and human environment 148

*Ulrik Ekman discusses the (assumed) democratic potential of digital technology and social media, the haunting of Turing's ghost, the third wave of computing as its extension into the social and human environment and externalization of psychological individuation in techniques. He talks about the role of algorithms as means of personalization and foreclosure, the affirmative and subversive energy of surveillance art, the transdisciplinary call of media literacy and the 'interpellative' aspect of participatory culture.*

6. **Mihai Nadin** | Enslaved by digital technology 184

*Mihai Nadin sees the human condition at stake in the Gold Rush obsession of digital technology entrepreneurs; he considers big data the 'ultimate surrender to the technology of brute force' and the age of information 'by definition an age of total transparency.' He detects a new Faustian deal where Faust trades better judgment for perfect calculation; he unmasks social media as the 'background for conformity' and revolutionary technology as the underlying foundation of the ruling economic system.*

7. **Nick Montfort** | Self-monitoring and corporate interests 206

> *Nick Montfort ponders about the fate of buzzwords in the history of digital media, praises the Internet for supporting intellectual advancement, and does not expect a for-profit organization such as Google to serve the intellectual community or nonprofit organization. He addresses self-monitoring systems as corporate monitoring systems, he assumes authorship over a text resulting from a program he wrote including legal responsibility in case this text incited a riot, and he doesn't fear the quantitative turn of Digital Humanities but hopes for a "digital media DH".*

8. **Rodney Jones** | The age of print literacy and 'deep critical attention' is filled with war, genocide and environmental devastation 228

*Rodney Jones points out the collusion of governments and corporations in an unregulated internet, as well as the potential of participatory media for grassroots movements and surveillance. He examines the discursive economies of social network sites and their algorithms, the (partially justified) replacement of experts by crowd wisdom, the (historical) dialectic of quantification and narrativisation (especially in clinical medicine), the self-tracking movement, the selfpresentation on Facebook, and the the current role of (media) literacy in the educational environment.*

9. **Diane Favro, Kathleen Komar, Todd Presner, Willeke Wendrich** | Surfing the web, algorithmic criticism and Digital Humanities 247

*The interviewees address the fear of 'derailment' on the digital highway, the 'lack of deep thinking' among their students and the worry of humanists (and especially the 'old folks') to be*

*devalued as thinkers by technological advances. They speak about the pluriformism of the Digital Humanities movement, about visualized thinking and collaborative theorization, about the connection between cultural criticism and Digital Humanities, they share their mixed experiences with the Digital Humanities program at UCLA, explain why most innovative work is done by tenured faculty and muse about the ideal representative of Digital Humanities.*

### 10. **N. Katherine Hayles** | Opening the depths, not sliding on surfaces 265

*N. Katherine Hayles discusses the advantages of social and algorithmic reading and reaffirms the value of deep reading; she doubts media literacy requires media abstinence; she underlines the importance of the Humanities for 'understanding and intervening' in society but questions the idolized 'rhetoric of "resistance"' and she weights the real problems facing the Digital Humanities against unfounded fears.*

### 11. **Jay David Bolter** | From writing space to designing mirrors 273

*Jay David Bolter talks about the (missing) embrace of digital media by the literary and academic community, about hypertext as a (failing) promise of a new kind of reflective praxis, about transparent (immediate) and reflected (hypermediate) technology. He compares the aesthetics of information with the aesthetics of spectacle in social media and notes the collapse of hierarchy and centrality in culture in the context of digital media.*

### 12. **Bernard Stiegler** | Digital knowledge, obsessive computing, short-termism and need for a negentropic Web 290

*Bernard Stiegler speaks about digital tertiary retention and the need for an epistemological revolution as well as new forms of doctoral studies and discusses the practice of 'contributive categorization,' the 'organology of transindividuation,' 'transindividuation of knowledge' and individuation as negentropic activity. He calls for an 'economy of de-proletarianization' as an economy of care, compares the impact of the digital on the brain with heroin and expects the reorganization of the digital from the long-term civilization in the East.*

### **Introduction**

*Roberto Simanowski*

### **Motivation: Quiet revolutions very quick**

There is a cartoon in which a father sits next to a boy of about twelve and says: 'You do my website... and I'll do your homework.' It accurately depicts the imbalance in media competency across today's generations, typically articulated in the vague and paradoxical terms: "digital natives" (for the young) and "digital immigrants" (for the over thirties). Historical research into reading has shown that such distinctions are by no means new: 250 years ago, when children began to be sent to school, it was not uncommon for twelve year olds to write the maid's love letters – an example that also demonstrates that conflicts between media access and youth protection were already in existence in earlier times. Is the father in the cartoon the maid of those far off times? Has nothing else changed other than the medium and the year?

What has changed above all is the speed and the magnitude of the development of new media. Few would have imagined 20 years ago how radically the Internet would one day alter the entirety of our daily lives, and fewer still could have predicted ten years ago how profoundly Web 2.0 would change the Internet itself. Since then, traditional ideas about identity, communication, knowledge, privacy, friendship, copyright, advertising, democracy, and political engagement have fundamentally shifted. The neologisms that new media have generated already testify to this: They blend what were formerly opposites — prosumer, slacktivism, viral marketing; turn traditional concepts upside-down — copyleft, crowdfunding, distant reading; and assert entirely new principles — citizen journalism, filter bubble, numerical narratives.

#### 10 Roberto Simanowski

Twenty years are like a century in web-time. In 1996 the new media's pioneers declared the *Independence of Cyberspace* and asked, 'on behalf of the future,' the governments of the old world, these 'weary giants of flesh and steel,' to leave them alone.1 Following this declaration others bestowed the new medium with the power to build its own nation. The 'citizens of the Digital Nation,' says a *Wired* article of 1997, are 'young, educated, affluent […] libertarian, materialistic, tolerant, rational, technologically adept, disconnected from conventional political organizations.'2 The 'postpolitical' position of these 'new libertarians' has since been coined the Californian Ideology or Cyber Libertarianism – they don't merely despise the government of the old world in the new medium, they despise government pure and simple.

Two decades later Internet activists and theorists are turning to the old nation state governments, asking them to solve problems in the online world, be it the right to be forgotten, the protection of privacy and net-neutrality, or the threatening power of the new mega players on the Internet.3 Meanwhile the political representatives of the 'Governments of the Industrial World' – which is now called the Information Society – meet regularly to discuss the governance of Cyberspace – which is now called the Internet. Governments, once at war with the Internet, are now mining it for data in order to better understand, serve, and control their citizens.4

Theorists have long scaled down their former enthusiasm for the liberating and democratizing potential of the Internet and have begun addressing its dark side: commercialization, surveillance, filter bubble, depoliticization, quantification, waste of time, loss of deep attention, being alone together, Nomophobia and FOMO (i.e. *no mo*bile-*phobia* and the *f*ear *o*f *m*issing *o*ut). Those who still praise the Internet as an extension of the public sphere, as an affirmation of deliberative democracy, as a power for collective intelligence, or even as identity workshop seem to lack empirical data or the skill of dialectical thinking. Have tables turned only for the worse?

It all depends on who one asks. If one looks for a more positive account, one should talk to entrepreneurs and software developers, to "digital natives", or even social scientists rather than addressing anyone invested in the Humanities. The former will praise our times and produce lists of "excitements": information at your finger tips whenever, wherever, and about whatever; ubiquitous computing and frictionless sharing; new knowledge about medical conditions and social circumstances; the customization of everything; and a couple of ends: of the gatekeeper, the expert, the middleman, even of the author as we knew it.

No matter what perspective one entertains, there is no doubt that we live in exciting times. Ours is the age of many 'silent revolutions' triggered by startups and the research labs of big IT companies. These are revolutions that quietly – without much societal awareness let alone discussion – alter the world we live in profoundly. Another ten or five years, and self-tracking will be as normal and inevitable as having a Facebook account and a mobile phone. Our bodies will constantly transmit data to the big aggregation in the cloud, facilitated by wearable devices sitting directly at or beneath the skin. Permanent recording and automatic sharing – be it with the help of smart glasses, smart contact lenses, or the Oculus Rift – will provide unabridged memory, shareable and analyzable precisely as represented in an episode of the British TV Sci-Fi series *Black Mirror*: "The Entire History of You". The digitization of everything will allow for comprehensive quantification; predictive analytics and algorithmic regulation will prove themselves as effective and indispensable ways to govern modern mass society. Not too early to speculate, not too early to remember.

### **Methodology: Differences disclosed by reiteration**

If a new medium has been around for a while it is good to look back and remember how we expected it to develop ten, twenty

#### 12 Roberto Simanowski

years ago. If the medium is still in the process of finding and reinventing itself, it is good to discuss the current state of its art and its possible future(s). The book at hand engages in the business of looking back, discusses the status quo, and predicts future developments. It offers an inventory of expectations: expectations that academic observers and practitioners of new media entertained in the past and are developing for the future. The observations shared in this book are conversations about digital media and culture that engage issues in the four central fields of politics and government, algorithm and censorship, art and aesthetics, as well as media literacy and education. Among the keywords discussed are: data mining, algorithmic regulation, the imperative to share, filter bubble, distant reading, power browsing, deep attention, transparent reader, interactive art, participatory culture.

These issues are discussed by different generations – particularly those old enough to remember and to historicize current developments in and perspectives on digital media – with different national backgrounds: scholars in their forties, fifties, sixties and seventies mostly from the US, but also from France, Brazil, and Denmark. The aim was also to offer a broad range of different people in terms of their relationship to new media. All interviewees research, teach, and create digital technology and culture, but do so with different foci, intentions, intensities, and intellectual as well as practical backgrounds. As a result the book is hardly cohesive and highlights the multiplicity in perspectives that exists among scholars of digital media. A key aspect of the book is that the interviews have been conducted by a German scholar of media studies with an academic background in literary and cultural studies. This configuration ensures not only a discussion of many aspects of digital media culture in light of German critical theory but also fruitful associations and connections to less well known German texts such as Max Picard's 1948 radio critique *The World of Silence* or Hans Jonas' 1979 *Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age*.

Another key aspect of this collection of interviews is its structure, which allows for a hypertextual reading. The interviews were mostly conducted by email and for each field, some questions were directed to all interviewees. They were given complete freedom to choose those relevant to their own work and engagements. Other questions were tailored to interviewees' specific areas of interest, prompting differing requests for further explanation. As a result, this book identifies different takes on the same issue, while enabling a diversity of perspectives when it comes to the interviewees' special concerns. Among the questions offered to everybody were: What is your favored neologism of digital media culture? If you could go back in history of new media and digital culture in order to prevent something from happening or somebody from doing something, what or who would it be? If you were a minister of education, what would you do about media literacy? Other recurrent questions address the relationship between cyberspace and government, the Googlization, quantification and customization of everything, and the culture of sharing and transparency. The section on art and aesthetics evaluates the former hopes for hypertext and hyperfiction, the political facet of digital art, the transition from the "passive" to "active" and from "social" to "transparent reading,"; the section on media literacy discusses the loss of deep reading, the prospect of "distant reading" and "algorithmic criticism" as well as the response of the university to the upheaval of new media and the expectations or misgivings respectively towards Digital Humanities.

That conversations cover the issues at hand in a very personal and dialogic fashion renders this book more accessible than the typical scholarly treatment of the topics. In fact, if the interviewer pushes back and questions assumptions or assertions, this may cut through to the gist of certain arguments and provoke explicit statements. Sometimes, however, it is better to let the other talk. It can be quite revealing how a question is understood or misunderstood and what paths somebody is taking in order to avoid giving an answer. Uncontrolled digression sheds light on specific ways of thinking and may provide a glimpse into how people come to hold a perspective rather foreign to our own. Sometimes, this too is part of the game, the questions or comments of the interviewer clearly exceed the lengths of the interviewee's response. The aim was to have the interviewer and the interviewee engage in a dialogue rather than a mere Q&A session. Hence, the responses not only trigger follow-up questions but are sometimes also followed by remarks that may be longer than the statement to which they react and the comment they elicit. The result is a combination of elaborated observations on digital media and culture, philosophical excurses into cultural history and human nature, as well as outspoken statements about people, events and issues in the field of new media.

### **Media Literacy: From how things work to what they do to us**

The overall objective of this book is media literacy, along with the role that Digital Humanities and Digital Media Studies can play in this regard. Media literacy, which in the discourse on digital media does not seem to attract the attention it deserves, is – in the US as well as in Germany – mostly conceptualized with respect to the individual using new media. The prevalent question in classrooms and tutorials is: what sorts of things can I do with new media and how do I do this most effectively? However, the achievement of media competency can only ever be a part of media literacy: competency must be accompanied by the ability to reflect upon media. The other important and too rarely asked question is: what is new media doing to us? As Rodney Jones puts it in his interview: 'The problem with most approaches to literacy is that they focus on "how things work" (whether they be written texts or websites or mobile devices) and teach literacy as something like the skill of a machine operator (encoding and decoding). Real literacy is more about "how *people* work" — how they use texts and media and semiotic systems to engage in situated social practices and enact situated social identities.'

The shift from *me* to *us* means a move from skills and vocational training towards insights and understanding with respect to the social, economic, political, cultural and ethical implications of digital media. Understood in this broader sense, in terms of anthropology and cultural studies, media literacy is not inclined to the generation of frictionless new media usage, but is determined to explore which cultural values and social norms new media create or negate and how we, as a society, should understand and value this. Media literacy in this sense, is, for example, not only concerned with how to read a search engine's ranking list but also with how the retrieval of information based on the use of a search engine changes the way we perceive and value knowledge.

The urge to develop reflective media literacy rather than just vocational knowhow raises the question about the appropriate institutional frameworks within which such literacy is to be offered. Is Digital Humanities – the new 'big thing' in the Humanities at large – be the best place? The qualified compound phrase "sounds like what one unacquainted with the whole issue might think it is: humanistic inquiry that in some way relates to the digital."5 For people acquainted with the ongoing debate (and with grammar), digital humanities is first and foremost what the adjective-plus-noun combination suggests: 'a project of employing the computer to facilitate humanistic research,' as Jay David Bolter, an early representative of Digital Media Studies, puts it, 'work that had been done previously by hand.' Digital Humanities is, so far, computer-supported humanities rather than humanities discussing the cultural impact of digital media. Some academics even fear Digital Humanities may be a kind of Trojan horse, ultimately diverting our attention not only from critical philosophical engagement but also from engaging with digital media itself.6 Others consider, for similar reasons, digital humanists the 'golden retrievers of the academy': they never get into dogfights because they hardly ever develop theories that anyone could dispute.7

To become a breed of this kind in the academic kennel scholars and commentators have to shift their interest 'away from thinking big thoughts to forging new tools, methods, materials, techniques …'8 In this sense, Johanna Drucker proposes an interesting, rigorous distinction of responsibilities: 'Digital Humanities is the cook in the kitchen and [...] Digital Media

#### 16 Roberto Simanowski

Studies is the restaurant critic.'9 The commotion of the kitchen versus the glamour of the restaurant may sound demeaning to digital humanists. Would it be better to consider them waiters connecting the cook with the critic? Would it be better to see them as the new rich (versus the venerable, though financially exhausted aristocracy) as Alan Liu does: 'will they [the digital humanists] once more be merely servants at the table whose practice is perceived to be purely instrumental to the main work of the humanities'?10

The more Digital Humanities advances from its origin as a tool of librarians towards an approach to the digital as an object of study, the more Digital Humanities grows into a second type or a third wave11, the more it will be able to provide a home for Digital Media Studies or sit with it at the table. The methods and subjects of both may never be identical. After all Digital Media Studies is less interested in certain word occurrences in Shakespeare than in the cultural implications of social network sites and their drive towards quantification. However, interests overlap when, for example, the form and role of self-narration on social network sites is discussed on the grounds of statistical data, or when the relationship between obsessive sharing and short attention span is proven by quantitative studies. The best way to do Digital Media Studies is to combine philosophical concerns with empirical data. The best way to do Digital Humanities is to trigger hermeneutic debates that live off of the combination of algorithmic analysis and criticism.

### **Summary: digital libertarianism, governmental regulation, phatic communication**

Naturally, interviews are not the ideal exercise yard for "golden retrievers." The dialogic, less formal nature of an interview makes it very different from the well-crafted essays shrouded in opaque or ambiguous formulations. A dialogue allows for provocation. As it turns out, there are a few angry men and women of all ages out there: angry about how digital media are changing our culture, angry at the people behind this change. In an article about Facebook you wouldn't, as John Cayley does in the interview, accuse Mark Zuckerberg of a 'shy, but arrogant and infantile misunderstanding of what it is to be a social human.' In a paper on higher education you wouldn't, as bluntly, as Mihail Nadin does, state that the university, once contributing 'to a good understanding of the networks,' today 'only delivers the tradespeople for all those start-ups that shape the human condition through their disruptive technologies way more than universities do.'

There is no shortage of critical and even pessimistic views in these interviews. However, there are also rather neutral or even optimistic perspectives. One example is the expectation that personalization 'becomes interactive in the other direction as well,' as Ulrik Ekman notes, 'so that Internet mediation becomes socialized rather than just having people become "personalized" and normatively "socialized" by the web medium.' However, most interviewees are more critical than enthusiastic. This seems to be inevitable since we are interviewing academics rather than software engineers, entrepreneurs or shareholders. To give an idea of what issues are of concern and how they are addressed, here are some of the findings on a few of the keywords listed above.

*1. Regarding the field of government, surveillance and control*, it does not come as a surprise that obsessive sharing and big data analysis are considered in relation to privacy and surveillance. There is the fear that 'our "personal" existence will become public data to be consumed and used but not to get to understand us as individuals through a daring but not implausible comparison: 'distance reading might become an analogy for distance relationships. No need to read the primary text—no need to know the actual person at all.' (Kathleen Kolmar) As absurd as it may sound, the problem starts with the distant relationship between the surveilling and the surveilled. A fictional but plausible case in point is the Oscar winning German movie *The Lives of Others* by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck about a Stasi officer who, drawn by the alleged subversive's personality, finally sides with his victim. Such a switch can't happen with an algorithm as "officer". Algorithms are immune to human relation and thus the final destination of any 'adiaphorized' society. Robert Kowalski's famous definition 'Algorithm = Logic + Control' needs the addendum: minus moral concerns.

While there are good reasons to fear the coming society of algorithmic regulation, many people – at the top and at the bottom and however inadvertently – are already pushing for it. Since – as any manager knows – quantification is the reliable partner of control, the best preparation for the algorithmic reign is the quantitative turn of/in everything: a shift from words to numbers, i.e. from the vague, ambiguous business of interpreting somebody or something to the rigid regime of statistics. Today, the imperative of quantification does not only travel top down. There is a culture of self-tracking and a growing industry of supporting devices, whose objective is a reinterpretation of the oracular Delphic saying 'Know Thyself,' aptly spelled out on the front page of quantifiedself.com: 'Self Knowledge Through Numbers.' Even if one is part of this movement and shares the belief in the advantages of crowd-sourced knowledge, one can't neglect the 'danger that self-monitoring can give rise to new regimens of governmentality and surveillance' and that 'the rise of self-tracking allows governments and health care systems to devolve responsibility for health onto individuals' (Rodney Jones). The original name of one of the life-logging applications, OptimizeMe, clearly suggests the goal to create 'neoliberal, responsibilized subjectivities'12 ultimately held accountable for problems that may have systemic roots. It suggests it so boldly, that the name was soon softened to Optimized.

To link back to the beginning of this introduction: It may be problematic to speak of a "digital nation," however, its "citizens" could eventually succeed in changing all nations according to the logic of the digital. David Golumbia calls it the 'cultural logic of computation' and concludes that Leibniz' perspective, 'the view that everything in the mind, or everything important in society, can be reduced to mathematical formulae and logical syllogisms,' has finally prevailed over Voltaire's 'more expansive version of rationalism that recognizes that there are aspects to reason outside of calculation.' Nadin even speaks of a new Faustian deal where Faust conjures the Universal Computer: 'I am willing to give up better Judgment for the Calculation that will make the future the present of all my wishes and desires fulfilled.'

The redefinition of self-knowledge as statistics demonstrates that transformation often begins with terminology. However, the *semiological guerrilla* or *détournement* is not conceptualized as resistance against the powerful but is being used by the most powerful corporations.13 An example is the term "hacker" which is now even found as self-description for members of governments, as Erick Felinto notes. Brazil's 'most progressive former minister of culture, Gilberto Gil, once said: "I'm a hacker, a minister-hacker".' Regardless how appropriate this claim was for Gil, Felinto seems to be correct when he holds that 'in a time when big corporations are increasingly colonizing cyberspace, we need to imbue people with the hacker ethics of freedom, creativity and experimentation.' However, creativity and experimentation are not inherently innocent as other interviewees state. 'Hackers may maintain an agnostic position concerning the significance or value of the data=capta that their algorithms bring into new relations with human order or, for that matter, human disorder,' Cayley holds, assuming that hackers may help the vectoralists of "big software" discover where and how to exploit profitable vectors of attention and transaction. Golumbia goes even further in expressing a reservation with regard to hackers and "hacktivism" pointing out the underlying 'right libertarianism,' the implicit celebration of power at the personal level, and 'its exercise without any discussion of how power functions in our society.' In addition one has to remember that freedom, creativity and experimentation all are terms also highly appreciated in any start-up and IT company. The "big corporations" that Felinto refers to have already hacked the term hacker: 'many tech business leaders today call themselves hackers; not only does Mark Zuckerberg call himself a hacker, but Facebook makes "hacking" a prime skill for its job candidates, and all its technical employees are encouraged to think of themselves as "hackers"' (Golumbia).

Have they hacked the very independence of cyberspace? For many the Internet today means Google and Facebook: billion dollar companies as the default interface on billions of screens teaching us to see the world according to their rules. The problem is now, as Nick Montfort states, 'that corporations have found a way to profitably insinuate themselves into personal publishing, communication, and information exchange, to make themselves essential to the communications we used to manage ourselves. As individuals we used to run BBSs, websites, blogs, forums, archives of material for people to download, and so on. Now, partly for certain technical reasons and partly because we've just capitulated, most people rely on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Google, and so on.'

The next wave of such "counter-revolution" is already on its way and it also starts in the academic realm itself.  One of the things, for which Ekman wishes more qualms and scruples, is 'pervasive healthcare' which, even in a small country like Denmark, a handful of research groups work on. Ekman's warning invokes the next blockbuster dystopia of our society in 30 or 20 years: the 'massive distribution and use of smart computational things and wirelessness might well soon alter our notion of the home, healthcare, and how to address the elderly in nations with a demography tilting in that direction.'

The driving force of progress is, apart from power and money, efficiency and convenience. This becomes clear in light of the success story of two examples of the 'transaction economy' which itself is the natural outcome of social media: *Uber*

and *airbnb*. As Nadin points out: 'In the transaction economy ethics is most of the time compromised', i.e. Uber disrupts the taxi services and all labor agreements, benefits and job security that may exist in this field. However, it is useless to blame the Uber driver for killing safe and well-paid jobs: What shall she do after she lost her safe and well-paid job in the hotel business? It is the tyranny of the market that we are dealing with and there is little one can do if one tends more toward Hayek's economic philosophy than to Keynes'. The situation is comparable to that of East-Germany in the early 1990s immediately after the fall of the Berlin wall: people bought the better products from West-Germany undermining their own jobs in archaic, inefficient companies that were not able to compete and survive without the help of protectionism or consumer patriotism. Maybe new media demand in a similar way a discussion of the extent to which we want to give up the old system. If we don't want the market alone to determine society's future we need discussions, decisions, and regulations. We may want 'to put politics and social good above other values, and then to test via democratic means whether technological systems themselves conform to those values,' as Golumbia suggests.

The result could be a state-powered Luddism to fight reckless technical innovations on the ground of ethical concerns and political decisions. The response to the "hacking" of cyberspace by corporations is the "embrace" of the government as the shield against the 'neoliberal entrepreneurialism, with its pseudoindividualism and pro-corporate ideology, and the inequities that intensify with disbalances of economic power' (Johanna Drucker). While in preparation for Industry 4.0 the "homo fabers" involved expect the government to pave the way for economic development, the observing "Hamlets" at humanities departments call for interventions and debate. But it is true, 'the fact that many Google employees honestly think they know what is good for the rest of society better than society itself does is very troubling' (Golumbia). The soft version of Neo-Luddites are Federal Commissions that do not blindly impede but consciously control innovations. Given the fact that computer technologies

#### 22 Roberto Simanowski

'are now openly advertised as having life-altering effects as extreme as, or even more extreme than, some drugs' it is only logical to request a FDA for computers, as Golumbia suggests, or to wish the 'FCC to protect us against the domination by private enterprise and corporate interests,' as Drucker does.

While it appears that the issue of corporations and regulations could be fixed with the right political will and power, other problems seem to be grounded in the nature of the Internet itself – such as the issue of political will and power. The political role of the Internet has been debated at least since newspapers enthusiastically and prematurely ran the headlines: 'In Egypt, Twitter trumps torture' and 'Facebook Revolution'. The neologisms "slacktivism" and "dataveillance" counter euphemisms such as "citizen journalism" or "digital agora". Jürgen Habermas – whose concept of the public sphere has been referred to many times and not only by German Internet theorists – is rather skeptical about the contribution digital media can make to democratic discourse. In his 2008 essay *Political Communication in Media Society: Does Democracy still have an Epistemic Dimension?*, Habermas holds that the asymmetric system of traditional mass media offers a better foundation for deliberative, participatory democracy than the bidirectional Internet, since the fragmented public sphere online and the operational modus of laypeople obstruct an inclusive and rigorous debate of the pros and cons of specific issues. The much objurgated or at least ignored experts once forced us to avoid the easier way and cope with complex analysis of a political issue. Today, after the liberation from such "expertocracy," we register a dwindling willingness to engage with anything that is difficult and demanding such as counter arguments or just complex ("complicated" and "boring") meditations. Not only is the democratic potential of the Internet questionable because now ISIS is using social media to recruit supporters, but also because the Internet 'does not "force" individuals to engage with a wider array of political opinions and in many cases makes it very easy for individuals to do the opposite' – whereas before, in the age of centralized mass media, there was 'a very robust and very interactive political dialogue in the US' (Golumbia).

The Internet not only decentralizes political discussion, it also distracts from it by burying the political under the personal and commercial. Yes, there are political weblogs and yes, the Internet makes it easy to attain, compare, check information free from traditional gatekeepers. However, the applied linguist also underlines the ongoing shift from Foucaultian 'orders of discourse' to Deleuzian 'societies of control': 'Opportunities to "express oneself" are just as constrained as before, only now by the discursive economies of sites like Facebook and YouTube.' (Jones) But how much of the information processed online each day is political anyway? How much of it is meaningless distraction? What Felinto affirms most likely echoes the belief of many cultural critics: 'Instead of focusing on the production of information and meaning, we're moving towards a culture of entertainment. We want to experience sensations, to have fun, to be excited. If silence is becoming impossible, meaning also seems to be in short supply theses days.'

*2. Fun, sensation, entertainment* are effective ways to occupy, or numb, brain time. As Adorno once famously said: Amusement is the liberation from thought and negation. Adorno's equation and Felinto's observation link the political to the psychological and shift the focus to issues of deep reading and attention span. Another very effective form of depolitisization is the subversion of the attention span and the skill of complex thinking, both needed in order to engage thoroughly with political issues. The obvious terms to describe the threat are "power browsing", "multi tasking", "ambient attention". The less obvious, most paradoxical and now quite robust term is "hypertext". It is robust because it doesn't depend on the user's approach to digital media but is embedded in the technical apparatus of these media. The multi-linear structure of the Internet is one of its essential features – and possibly one of the most reliable threats to complex thinking.

This is ironic, since it was precisely hypertext technology which, in the 1990s, was celebrated not only as liberation from the "tyranny of the author" but also as destabilization of

#### 24 Roberto Simanowski

the signifier and as highlighting the ambivalence and relativity of propositions. Hypertext was seen as an ally in the effort to promote and practice reflection and critical thinking; some even saw it as a revolution of irony and skepticism14. Today hypertext technology – and its cultural equivalent hyper-reading – appears, by contrast, as the practice of nervous, inpatient reading, discouraging a sustained engagement with the text at hand and thus eventually and inevitably hindering deep thinking; an updated version of 'amusement' in Adorno's theory of the culture industry. Jay David Bolter – who agrees that the literary hypertext culture some academics were envisioning at the end of the 20th century never came to be – considers the popularization of hypertext in the form of the WWW 'a triumph of hypertext not limited to or even addressed by the academic community.' How welcome is this unexpected triumph given that it contributes to the trend, noted by Felinto, of ubiqutious 'stupidification' in Bernard Stiegler's characterization?

When it comes to issues such as attention span and deep reading, academics respond as teachers having their specific, anecdotal classroom experiences. While the extent to which Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia and other digital tools of information or distraction make us stupid is debatable, there is the assertion – for example by neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf as popularized in Nicholas Carr's book *The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains* – that multitasking and power browsing make people unlearn deep reading and consequently curtail their capacity for deep thinking. Such a judgment has been countered by other neuroscientists and popular writers, who hold that new media increase brain activity and equip digital natives to process information much faster. The debate of course reminds us of earlier discussions in history concerning the cognitive consequences of media use. The German keywords are Lesesucht (reading addiction) which was deplored in the late 18th century and Kinoseuche (cinema plague) which broke out in the early 20th century. Famous is the defense of the cinema as preparation for life in the modern world and put forward by Walter Benjamin in his essay *The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical*  *Reproduction*. While others complain that the moving image impedes thought, Benjamin applauded the shock experience of the montage as a 'heightened presence of mind' required for the age of acceleration.

Those who have not read other texts by Benjamin may be tempted to refer to his contrary praise of cinema (contrary, relative to all the condemnations of the new medium by conservatives) when insisting on the beneficial effects of new media for cognition. Others may point to the difference between Geistesgegenwart (presence of mind), that Benjamin sees increased by cinema, and Geistestiefe (deep thinking). The shift from deep to hyper reading resembles the shift from deep Erfahrung (interpreted experience) to shallow Erlebnis (lived experience) that Benjamin detected and criticized in other essays. Processing more information faster in order to safely get to the other side of a busy street is very different from digesting information so that it still means something to us the next day. This meaning-to-us is at stake in a medial ecosystem that favors speed and mass over depth.

If the 'templates of social networking sites such as Facebook constitute a messy compromise between information and spectacle,' as Bolter notes, one may, with Bolter, place his hope on text-based media such as WhatsApp and Twitter: 'The baroque impulse toward spectacle and sensory experience today seems to be in a state of permanent but productive tension with the impulse for structured representation and communication.' On the other hand, the templates of these media (140 signs or less) do not encourage the transmission of complex information nor the engagement in deep discussion. These are "phatic technologies"15 good for building and maintaining relationships, good for fun, sensation, and entertainment. Whether this is reason enough to be alarmed, Bolter will discuss in his next book, *The Digital Plenitude,* arguing that we experience different forms of cultural expressions which are not reconcilable and holding that 'we have to understand that outside our community this discourse [about what kind of cultural standards we have to pursue] isn't necessarily going to make much sense.' Bolter's conclusion

#### 26 Roberto Simanowski

is radical beyond postmodernism and contrary to any culture pessimism: 'That's exactly what people like Nicholas Carr on the popular level or some conservative academics on the scholarly level are concerned about when they complain about the loss of reflective reading or the ability to think and make arguments.'

For many addressed by Bolter, Wikipedia is one of the red flags concerning the cultural implications of digital media. The concern is mostly directed towards the accuracy of a crowdsourced encyclopedia vs. one written by experts. However, several studies suggest that Wikipedia's score compared to "official" encyclopedia is not as bad as usually assumed. There are other worries: What does it mean when Wikipedia "intends to be and has partly succeeded at being *the* single site for the totality of human knowledge" (Golumbia)? What does it mean when an encyclopedia rather than monographs or essays becomes the only source students consult today? How will it change the culture of knowledge when one encyclopedia plus search engines become the prevalent form for presenting and perceiving knowledge?

One result of the new approach to knowledge is known to many teachers who discover that students today have a 'shorter concentration span' and favor audio-visual information over reading (Willeke Wendrich); that they 'want instant and brief responses to very complex questions' (Kolmar); and that their 'moan-threshold' for reading-assignments has fallen from 20 to 10 pages: 'Deep reading is increasingly viewed as an educational necessity, not something done outside the classroom, for pleasure or personal learning' (Diane Favro). Katherine N. Hayles, in her article in *Profession* "Hyper and Deep Attention: The Generational Divide in Cognitive Modes", shares a similar sense of these questions already in 2007. Others may have better experiences or see the reason less in digital media than in the move of higher education towards the type of instrumentalism found in vocational training. They may be convinced that 'the era of deep attention is largely a fantasy that has been projected backwards to romanticize a world that never existed' and point to teenagers playing videogames: 'their rapt attention, complex strategy making, and formidable attention to detail' (Todd Presner).

Stiegler, who translates Carr's concerns into political language and detects a threat to society if the capability of critical attention is compromised, speaks of the digital as opium for the masses, an expanding addiction to constant sensual stimulation. Stiegler considers the digital a pharmakon – which can be either medicine or poison depending on its use – 'prescribed by sellers of services, the dealers of digital technology.' He does not accuse Google or other big Internet-companies of bad intentions but blames us, the academics, who did not 'make it our job to produce a digital pharmacology and organology.' While the theoretical implications of this task are 'new forms of high-level research' *of* rather than *with* digital instruments, one pragmatic facet of such digital pharmacology is a certain form of media abstinence in order to develop real media literacy: 'Children should first be absolutely versed in grammar and orthography before they deal with computation. Education in school should follow the historical order of alteration of media, i.e. you begin with drawing, continue with writing, you go on to photography, for example, and then you use the computer which would not be before students are 15 or 16.'

Other interviewees, however, suggest that all elementary school kids should learn to program and to 'create and critique data sets' (Drucker) or object: 'Stiegler's approach of "adoption no!" may be feasible for very young pre-schoolers, it becomes ineffective, and probably impossible, for children older than five as they become exposed to school, classmates, and other influences outside of the home.' (Hayles) The notion of peer pressure is certainly operative and it is also true that the tradition of deep attention always 'required the support and nurturing of institutions—intellectual discourse and an educated elite' and that therefore today the role of 'educators at every level, from

#### 28 Roberto Simanowski

kindergarten through graduate school, should be to make connections between contemporary practices, for example browsing and surfing the web, and the disciplined acquisition of knowledge' (Hayles). However, one does wonder whether children have to be exposed to computers as early as advocates of classrooms decked with technology maintain, if it is so easy to pick up the skills to use computers and so difficult to learn the skill of "deep reading." It is also worth noticing in this context that those who invent, sell and advertise – 'prescribe' as Stiegler puts is – the new technology partly keep their own children away from it or take measures to ensure it does not turn into a poisoning drug: Executives at companies like Google and eBay send their children to a Waldorf school where electronic gadgets are banned until the eighth grade, and Steve Jobs denied his kids the iPad.16

What shall we think of people preaching wine but drinking water? At best, these parents are selling toys they consider too dangerous for their own kids. At worst, they want to ensure their own breed's advantage over people addicted to sensory stimulation and unprepared for tasks that demand concentration, endurance and critical thinking. In a way, what these parents do in their family context is what Golumbia wants society to do on a bigger scale: to check whether new technological tools conform to the values of this society – or family.

No matter what one considers the best age to be introduced to the computer or how one sees the issue of deep reading and deep attention, there is no doubt that today younger generations are immersed in constant communication. They are online before they see the bathroom in the morning and after they have turned off the light in the evening: 'They live entirely social existences, always connected and in an exchange, no matter how banal, about the ongoing events of daily life.' (Drucker) But Drucker is less concerned about the prevalence of phatic communication than the 'single most shocking feature' of the way young people are living their lives nowadays: 'that they have no interior life and no apparent need or use for it.' For Drucker the disregard and discard of reflection, meditation, imaginative musing jeopardizes innovation, change, and invention which 'have always come from individuals who broke the mold, thought differently, pulled ideas into being in form and expression. Too much sociality leads to dull normativity.' The birth of conventionalism out of the spirit of participation; this implicit thesis in Drucker's account is spelled out in Nadin's assessment: 'social media has become not an opportunity for diversity and resistance, but rather a background for conformity.'

One could go even further and say: too much sociality through mobile media and social network sites spoils the cultural technique of sustained, immersed reading. The reason for this is associated with another essential feature of the Internet: its interactivity, its bias to bidirectional communication, its offer to be a sender rather than "just" a reader. 'Feed, don't read the Internet,' this slogan was around before the turn of the century. Today people read as much as they can. They must do so, if they want to keep up the conversation and avoid trouble with their friends. What they mustn't do is: wait too long for their turn. Nobody expects them to listen for long before they are allowed to answer; nobody except their teachers. In his 1932 essay *The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication*, Bertolt Brecht demands a microphone for every listener. It was the Marxist response to the advent of a new medium; a response that exploited the unrealized potential of the medium ('undurchführbar in dieser Gesellschaftsordnung, durchführbar in einer anderen') as an argument to fight for a new social order. The notion of turning the listener into a speaker reappears with the concept of the open artwork and the advent of hypertext. The readers' freedom to chose their own navigation through the text was celebrated as 'reallocation of power from author to reader.'17 This perspective was later dismissed on the ground that it was still the author who composed the links and that, on the other hand, the feeling of being 'lost in hyperspace'18 hardly constitutes liberation or power. Who – of all the scholars of literature celebrating the end of linear reading back in the 1990s – would have thought that it actually was the hope for the empowerment of the reader itself that had to be dismissed?

#### 30 Roberto Simanowski

The natural development, following from the demise of patient, obedient readers is their replacement by a machine; the sequel to "hyper-reading" is "distant reading". Nonetheless, the relationship of the reader to the author is similar: one no longer engages in a careful following – or 'listening' to – the author's expression but rather navigates the text according to one's own impulses and interests. The new pleasure of the text is its algorithmic mining. However, for the time being there is still a significant difference between these two alternatives to good old "deep reading": distant or algorithmic reading is not meant as a substitution for deep reading. Rather it 'allows us to ask questions impossible before, especially queries concerning large corpora of texts,' which is why 'we should not interpret algorithmic reading as the death of interpretation' as Hayles states: 'How one designs the software, and even more, how one interprets and understands the patterns that are revealed, remain very much interpretive activities.' The exciting goal is to carry out algorithmic reading in tandem with hermeneutic interpretation in the traditional sense, as Hayles with Allen Riddell does of Mark Danielewski's *Only Revolutions* in her book *How We Think*. Hayles' perspective and praxis counters any cultural pessimism opting for a use of new technologies in a way that does not compromise the old values: 'Instead of "adoption, not adaption" my slogan would be "opening the depths, not sliding on surfaces".'

*3. Digital Humanities and higher education* is a link that, unsurprisingly, creates certain scepticism among the interviewees. If the Humanities are seen as 'expressions of resistance' that 'probe the science and technology instead of automatically accepting them,' as Nadin does, then the 'rushing into a territory of methods and perspectives defined for purposes different from those of the humanities' does not seem to be a good tradeoff. Nadin's anger goes further. He addresses the university as an institution giving in to the mighty IT companies and the deterministic model of computation: 'If you want to control individuals, determinism is what you want to instill in everything: machines, people, groups. Once upon a time, the university contributed to a good understanding of the networks. Today, it only delivers the trades-people for all those start-ups that shape the human condition through their disruptive technologies way more than universities do.'

The criticism of the 'intrusion of capital' into the sphere of higher education (Golumbia) is shared by others who fear that 'differently motivated services outside the institutions of higher education will first offer themselves to universities and then, quite simply, fold their academic missions and identities into vectoralist network services' (Cayley). The assumption is that the digital infrastructure of the university will affect its academic mission: '"cost-effective' and more innovative services provided from *outside* the institution' Cayley holds 'may then go on to reconstitute the institution itself. "Google" swallows computing services at precisely the historical moment when digital practices swallow knowledge creation and dissemination. Hence "Google" swallows the university, the library, the publisher.' Was this inevitable? Is it still stoppable? Golumbia is not surprised 'that academics, who often rightly remain focused on their narrow areas of study, were neither prepared nor really even in a position to mitigate these changes.' Montfort is less reproachful and displays more hope for resistance within academia: The research Google is conducting is, 'by the very nature of their organization as a corporation, for the purpose of enriching their shareholders. That by itself doesn't make Google 'evil,' but the company is not going to solve the scholarly community's problems, or anyone else's problems, unless it results in profit for them. A regulation won't fix this; we, as scholars, should take responsibility and address the issue.'

While Nadin implies that the humanities and the university in general are being rebuilt according to the paradigms of computer science and big business, in Hayles' view 'these fears either reflect a misunderstanding of algorithmic methods […] or envy about the relatively abundant funding streams that the Digital Humanities enjoy.' She does not exclude the possibility that Digital Humanities is 'being coopted by corporate funding to the extent that pedagogical and educational priorities are

#### 32 Roberto Simanowski

undercut' nor does she neglect the need for 'defining significant problems rather than ones tailored to chasing grants.' However, one should, with Hayles, see the exciting prospects of combining algorithmic data analysis with traditional criticism rather than always looking for the dark side of the digital humanities. In the same spirit Montfort underlines the valuable insights that already have been reached from computational humanistic study and points out: 'Fear of quantitative study by a computer is about as silly as fearing writing as a humanistic method – because writing turns the humanities into a branch of rhetoric, or because writing is about stabilizing meaning, or whatever.'

After all, rather than being colonized by technical science, digital humanities can also be seen as the opposite if it brings the 'insights from the humanities that are seldom considered, let alone valued in the sciences, including computer science' to computational approaches: 'that data are not objective, often ambiguous, and context dependent' (Wendrich). The same hope – that 'it will be the humanistic dimensions that gain more traction in the field—not just as content, but as methods of knowledge, analysis, and argument' – is uttered by Drucker who rightly calls on Digital Humanities to overcome its obsession with definitions and start to deliver: 'until a project in Digital Humanities has produced work that has to be cited by its home discipline— American History, Classics, Romantic Poetry, etc.—for its *argument* (not just as a resource)—we cannot claim that DH has really contributed anything to scholarship.'

### **Conclusion and Speculation: Media ethics from a German perspective**

If we don't limit the discussion of media ecology to either the contemporary reinvention of the term in the work of Matthew Fuller or the conservative environmentalism of post-McLuhan writers such as Neil Postman, we may refer to the magnum opus of a German philosopher who discussed the cultural implications of technological advancement and its threat to humanity in the light of the first Club of Rome report. In his 1979 book *The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age* Hans Jonas demanded an 'ethics of responsibility for distant contingencies.'19 We have to consider the consequences of our actions even though they do not affect us or our immediate environment directly. It is remarkable that Jonas saw the fatality of man lying in the 'triumph of *homo faber*' that turns him into 'the compulsive executer of his capacity': 'If nothing succeeds like success, nothing also entraps like success.'20 Almost 40 years later it is clear that we have more than ever given in to this imperative of technological success and compulsively create hardware and software whose consequences we barely understand.

Jonas' warning and demand are part of the environmentalism that developed rapidly in the 1970s. The discussion today about big data, privacy and the quantitative turn through digital media, social networks and tracking applications has been linked to the environmental catastrophe in order to broaden the discussion of relations and responsibilities.21 Just as, at a certain point, one's energy bill was no longer simply a private matter – after all the ecological consequences of our energy consumption affects all of us – the argument is now that our dealings with personal data have an ethical dimension. The supply of personal data about driving styles, consumption habits, physical movement, etc. contributes to the establishing of statistical parameters and expectations against which all customers, clients and employees, regardless of their willingness to disclose private data, will be measured. Generosity with private data is no private issue. In other words: obsessive sharing and committed self-tracking are social actions whose ramifications ultimately exceed the realm of the individuals directly involved.

There is no question that society needs to engage in a thorough reflection on its technological development and a broad discussion about its cultural implications. There is no doubt that universities and especially the Humanities should play an important role in this debate. However, it is also quite clear that the search for an ethics in the age of Web 3.0 and Industry 4.0 is much harder than it was in Jonas' time. While nobody questions the objective of environmentalists to secure the ground and future of all living beings (the point of contention is only the actual degree of the danger), digital media don't threaten human life but "only" its current culture. Data pollution, the erosion of privacy and the subversion of deep attention are not comparable to air pollution, global warming and resource depletion.22 The ethics of preservation is on less sound ground if this project aims to preserve cultural standards and norms. Even if people agree on the existence of the threat they will not agree on how to judge the threat. After all, this is a central lesson that the Humanities teach: radical upheavals in culture are inherent to society.

Nonetheless, the ongoing and upcoming upheavals and revolutions need to be discussed with scholarly knowledge and academic rigor. According to many interviewees in this book such discussion is not taking place as it should. The reasons are not only political, but also epistemological and methodological. 'We were given the keys to the car with very little driver's education' and hence incur a high risk of 'derailment' on the digital highway, as Favro puts is. To stay with the metaphor: We also lack the time to look beneath the hood. Rather than pulling all the new toys apart in order to understand how they work we just learn how to operate them.  The frenetic pace of innovation has a reason, as Nadin makes clear: 'what is at stake is not a circuit board, a communication protocol, or a new piece of software, but the human condition. The spectacular success of those whom we associate with the beginnings lies in monetizing opportunities. They found gold!' When Nadin speaks of the 'victory of "We can" over "What do we want?" or "Why?"' it is reminiscent of Jonas' comment on *homo faber*.  This dependence explains why, instead of liberating the human being, digital technology has enslaved everyone—including those who might never touch a keyboard or look at a monitor.' We need a 'reorganization of the digital,' Stiegler accordingly says, because the Web, 'completely subject to computation and automation,' is producing entropy, while the 'question for the future, not only for the Web, but for human kind is to produce negentropy.'

Of course, such negative assessment of the ongoing technological revolution is debatable. It is not only Mark Zuckerberg who, along with his wife in a letter to their newly born daughter, considers the world a better place thanks to digital technology, including of course the opportunity for people to connect and share.23 Many others too expect advances in health care, social organization, and individual life from computation and automation. Nonetheless, if experts demand the prohibition of certain technological advancement citing predictable devastating consequences – take the *Open Letter from AI and Robotics Researchers* from July 28 in 2015 to ban autonomous weapons – one feels reassured that there is indeed an essential risk that many researchers and entrepreneurs are taking at our expense. This risk is not reduced to weapons and the scenarios of cyberwar (or worse: cyber terrorism) in a world after Industry 4.0 and the Internet of Things. It includes genetically-engineered viruses and self-learning artificial intelligence whose decisions exceed human capacity for comprehension. The questions such consideration raises are pressing: Where does the marriage of intelligence and technology lead us? Who or what are the driving forces? How did they get their mandate? And most importantly: Is it possible to stop them/it?

If we hear scientists who do research on invisible (killer) drones or genetic design we don't hear them refer to Friedrich Dürrenmatt's 1961 tragicomedy *The Physicians* where a genius physicist feigns madness so he is committed to a sanatorium and can prevent his probable deadly invention from ever being used. What we see instead is the excitement to overcome scientific problems with little qualms concerning humanity's ability to handle the outcomes. Technical discoveries, technological advancement will be made, where and when possible, regardless of the benefit to humanity. Some scientists defend their ambition with the notion that not scientists, but society must decide what use it wants to make of the technology made available.

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Others, referring to economic and military competition, argue that there is no universal authority that has the power for binding decisions: If we don't do it, the enemy will. It is difficult to ignore this argument, even though dangerous inventions have been successfully banned worldwide, such as blinding lasers, by the UN in 1998. This said, it is also difficult not to consider those scientists opportunists who talk about excitement and competition rather than responsibility, while secretly being in contact with companies interested in producing the perfect embryo or an invisible drone.

Perhaps we mistake the actual problem if we only focus on the "black sheep" among scientists and engineers. Maybe it is really the *human condition* that is at stake here, though in a different way than addressed by Nadin. To turn to another, much older German philosopher: In the third proposition of his 1784 *Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose* Immanuel Kant considers the 'purpose in nature' that man go 'beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence' and gain happiness from the perfection of skills. The means to do so is to constantly develop the utmost human capacity of reason, from generation to generation, bestowing each with ever more refined technology: hammer, steam-engine, electric motor, computer, artificial intelligence. To Kant, this teleological concept of (reason in) history is entelechic; he presumes (as many of his contemporaries did) a development for the better. To later thinkers, however, such as Hannah Arendt in her 1968 *Men in Dark Times*, the idealism of the enlightenment looks like 'reckless optimism in the light of present realities', i.e. the achieved capacity of mankind to destroy itself with nuclear weapons.24 As mentioned, since then the advances in human intelligence have brought many more powerful means to life that can end or suppress human life.

Maybe Kant's optimism is the result of a premature conclusion from the third proposition in his *Idea* (to gain happiness from the perfection of skills, i.e. unlimited research) to the eighth proposition (the philosophical chiliasm, i.e. perfection of humankind). There is a tension between theoretical reason (that drives us to explore and invent as much as we can) and practical reason (that should forbid certain inventions). It is a tension between the *homo faber* as 'compulsive executer of his capacity' and man's 'responsibility for distant contingencies' to use Jonas' words. It is a tension between the enthusiastic "We can!" and the cautious "Why?" and "To what end?" to refer to Nadin again. In the new Faustian deal, that Nadin speaks of, the devil is the computer or rather: artificial intelligence, with which we trade better judgment for fulfilled desires. The obvious risk of such a deal is the extinction of men or their being locked in or out by post-human intelligence as addressed in 2015 by Alex Garland's *Ex Machina* and as early as 1968 in Stanley Kubrick's *2001: A Space Odyssey* which renders Kant's generational relay race of ever better tools as result of ever better use of the human capacity of reason in a famous and alarming short cut.

However, the metaphor of Faust leaves room for hope. If we perceive the new Faustian deal in the spirit of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, it is open ended. For in Goethe's play the bargain between Faust and Mephisto is not a "service for soul"-trade but a bet. It is Faust who self-confidently dictates the rules of the bargain:25

*If the swift moment I entreat: Tarry a while! You are so fair! Then forge the shackles to my feet, Then I will gladly perish there! Then let them toll the passing-bell, Then of your servitude be free, The clock may stop, its hands fall still, And time be over then for me!*

Since Faust, who finally turns into a restless and somewhat reckless entrepreneur, wins the bet and is saved, we may look calmly on the new deal. Even more so in light of another important detail in Goethe's *Faust*, Mephisto's ambivalent nature announced when he introduces himself to Faust:

*[I am] Part of that force which would Do ever evil, and does ever good.*

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Such ambiguity and contradiction has long attracted German thinkers, as for example the Christian mystic Jacob Böhme who, in the early 17th century, understood the Fall of Man, i.e. the use of reason, as an act of disobedience necessary for the evolution of the universe. Two centuries later the negative as precondition of the good, the clash of antithesis and thesis was called dialectic. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, who was influenced by both Goethe and Böhme, considered contradictions and negations necessary elements for the advancement of humanity. Before him, Kant employed contradictions as the dynamic means of progress when, in the fourth proposition of his *Idea* for example, he discusses the 'unsocial sociability' of man that finally turns 'desire for honour, power or property' into 'a *moral* whole'. The negative is the vehicle for the implicit purpose of nature with which Kant substitutes God and which, in the ninth proposition, he also calls providence. In light of this concept of dialectic progress Mephisto's further self-description sounds harmless:

*The spirit which eternally denies! And justly so; for all that which is wrought Deserves that it should come to naught*

However, the confidence that everything bad is finally good for us may be nothing more than the "reckless optimism" that Arendt detects in the Enlightenment's spirit of history and humanity's role in it. What if we can't count on that dialectic appeasement any longer after the advancement of a certain capacity for destruction? What if providence turns out to be exactly what Mephisto says: simply negation (rather than Hegel's double negation) with negative results for all of us? What if we really 'should get rid of the last anthropic principle, which is life itself' – as Felinto paraphrases the Argentine philosopher Fabián Ludueña – and accept a 'universe without a human observer' rather than assume 'man is the final step in the development of life'? What if technology turns out to be less an act of liberation from the determinations of nature than an obsession, entertained by the 'purpose of nature,' humans can't help even if it finally kills them? What if the ride we undertake in that "car" on the digital highway does not have, as a kind of "divine algorithm," a built-in emergency brake in case human reason turns out to be devastating?

Despite learning from the past and despite predictive analytics: with regard to the future we are blind. We may, hearing the diligent workers around us, celebrate the arrival of a better world, while in fact people are digging our grave, as it happens to Goethe's Faust. After a symbolic dialogue with the Sorge (which means *worry* but also *care* in German) whom he dismisses and who punishes him with blindness, Faust mistakes the Lemuren digging his grave on Mephisto's order for his workers building a dam to defy nature.26 Is this our situation? Are we, without worries and care, blind about the implications of our actions? Are we facing an inhuman, adiaphorized society while hoping big data and algorithmic regulation will make the world a better place? Are we turning ourselves into objects of "panoptic" control by pursuing datafication and the ubiquity of smart objects? Is the rise of the machine the end of men? To come back to our philosophical references: Does Hegel's Absoluter Geist (the single mind of all humanity that becomes self-aware and free through the march of reason) reach its destiny in the form of artificial intelligence? Is the Kantian capacity for reason fulfilled once human consciousness is passed on to machines? Or is it rather overdone?

There are many questions to be raised in light of ongoing technological development. Media literacy, without a doubt, is important and has to move on from vocational "How"-questions to critical "What for?"-questions, from "How can I use these media?" to "What do they do to us?" It is important to understand media in their historical context and from an anthropological perspective. As the following interviews demonstrate, in such endeavor not only contemporaries such as Nicolas Carr and Sherry Turkle can be helpful and inspiring but even pre-digital ancestors such as the French Blaise Pascal and the Swiss Max Picard. If the discussion aims at a philosophical treatment rather than a phenomenological approach people tend to turn to Gilbert Simondon, Manuel DeLanda and Vilém Flusser. As these interviews show there are more techno-philosophers to be (re) discovered for the discussion needed – and as this introduction suggests, Goethe's *Faust* and Böhme's mysticism could, should, be part of it.

### **Notes**

humanism privileges the old at the expanse of the new" (in: ibid., 429-437: 434).

### 42 Roberto Simanowski

in: Ray McAleese (ed.): *Hypertext: theory into practice*, Edinburgh 1999, 90-105.

# **At the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities**

*Johanna Drucker*

Johanna Drucker has a reputation as both a book artist as well as a pioneer of what has become known as Digital Humanities. She is well known for her studies on visual poetics and experimental typography (*The Visible Word* 1994, *Figuring the Word* 1998) but also for her investigations of visual forms of knowledge production (*Graphesis* 2014), digital aesthetics and speculative computing (*SpecLab* 2008) and *Digital\_Humanities* (2012, co-authored). She has worked as a Professor in Art History (Columbia, Yale, & SUNY) and Media Studies (University of Virginia) and since 2008 is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA.

Johanna welcomes governmental regulation on the internet against 'neoliberal entrepreneurialism,' rejects new grand narratives 'reconfigured by the pseudo-authority of computation' and considers the sociality of contemporary existence an obstacle for 'interior life,' innovation, and zoophilia. She compares Digital Humanities with the 'cook in the kitchen' and Digital Media Studies with the 'restaurant critic,' sees the platform and tool development in the Humanities as a professional, not academic track, she calls for a visual epistemology in times of Screen culture and diagrammatic knowledge production and she explains how to contaminate the world of quantitative and disambiguating underpinnings with the virtues of relativism and multi-perspectivism.

### **Prelude**

**Roberto Simanowski:** What is your favored neologism of digital media culture and why?

**Johanna Drucker:** I'm drawn to neologisms that serve as both nouns and verbs–tweet, google, email–because they indicate a blurring of action and object in a way that embodies the fluidly unstable transience of digital media. But I also like geek, geekify, geek-out, and digerati (along with their offspring, the digeratini) used as self-identification.

**RS:** If you could go back in history of new media and digital culture in order to prevent something from happening or somebody from doing something, what or who would it be?

**JD:** I'd legislate against the violence being done to net neutrality and get the FCC to protect us against the domination by private enterprise and corporate interests. This will be the end of access to academic, scholarly, and independent thought online.

**RS:** What comes to mind if you hear "Digital Media Studies"?

**JD:** Digital Media Studies uses tools such as critical theory, cultural studies, media archaeology, bibliographical, textual, and visual studies, and a host of highly focused approaches to software, platforms, interface, networks and other technical aspects of networked environments to expose their workings. It is almost entirely a critical practice except when explicitly linked to making.

**RS:** If you were a minister of education, what would you do about media literacy?

**JD:** I'd insist that all elementary school kids learn to create and critique data sets, know some basic statistics, learn database structure, interface design, and know how to analyze search engines, be able to do some scripting/programming, and be taught how to do data wrangling and introductory digital media studies. Skill in reading texts and images for their arguments as well as their content remains essential, but across the full spectrum of media formats.

### **Politics and Government**

**RS:** Web 2.0 culture seems to have tamed and commodified the wild, anarchistic Internet of the 1990s when people played with identity in IRCs and MUDs and built their own websites in idiosyncratic ways. Today, clarity and transparency are the dominating values, and for obvious reasons, since only true and honest information are valid data in the context of commerce. This shift has also changed the role of the government. While in the 1990s Internet pioneers such as John Perry Barlow declared the independence of Cyberspace from the governments of the old world, now it seems people hope for governments to intervene in the taking-over and commercialization of the Internet by huge corporations such as Google and Facebook. Thus, web activists calling for the government to pass laws to protect privacy online, and politicians suggesting expiration dates for data on social networks appear to be activist in a battle for the rights of the individual. Have tables turned to that extent? Are we, once rejecting old government, now appealing to it for help?

**JD:** The Internet began as a government research project, through linked cables connecting major research universities and facilities that had defense contracts. So the Net and the Web began under government jurisdiction. Concerns about regulation cut across a range of issues –protections and violations of privacy are only part of the larger landscape. The overarching disaster of our lifetime is deregulation of all aspects of social life, the demonization of taxation, extreme income inequity, and undermining of the social contract as conceived by the 18th century polymaths who designed the Constitution of the United States.

The non-standard approaches to interface that were part of CD-Rom era electronic literature, arts, and design, like those of first generation web sites, were less constrained by convention than today's menu-drive and side-bar organized ones, and innovation does seem to have stymied in the rush to fixity, to the conventional screen display. But the design issue is separate from the ideology of individualism (mythic, in my opinion) and the kind of libertarianism that lurks under the rhetoric of certain activist movements. I'm not an anarchist. Quite the contrary, I think cultures are about negotiation of and through limits on what can and can't be tolerated, allowed, condemned. I'm far more afraid of deregulation, the end of internet neutrality, and the intersection of rhetorical assertions that combine neoliberal entrepreneurialism, with its pseudo-individualism and procorporate ideology, and the inequities that intensify with disbalances of economic power. I'll take government regulation over that any time, and that does not have to mean compromises to protected rights and liberties such as free speech and privacy.

Do most Internet users actually know what their rights and responsibilities are as citizens, let alone how the laws of the Interstate Commerce Commission, the Federal Communications Commission, Department of Justice, and other agencies actually regulate the Web? I doubt it. Like many people, they want the government out of their lives when it comes to taxes, accountability and responsibility but they want it in their lives to fix roads, maintain services like police and fire, and come to their aid in a major disaster—or keep the internet "there" for them. Children and adolescents have the same relationship to their parents. We have to get beyond models of government as dysfunctional family relationships and see that we are the regulating and responsible parties. No other grownups are going to appear. The internet may have begun as a government research project, but service providers are for-profit businesses and we depend on their cables, routers, servers, and infrastructure.

**RS:** I like very much your analogy about kids and parents. A companion and counterpart to responsibility is the entrepreneurialism you mention which makes me think of the young, energetic, and very excited startups as portrayed in the *Silicon Valley* TV series. It's a specific mixture of technophile, profit seeking and changing-the-world intent; and it is problematic in all three regards. The German philosopher Hans Jonas, in his 1979 book *The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age*, notes that the fatality of man lies in the 'triumph of *homo faber*' that makes him into 'the compulsive executer of his capacity.' The blithe excitement about social media, cloud computing and data mining we are encountering today seems to illustrate Jonas' apprehension: 'If nothing succeeds like success, nothing also entraps like success.' The inventive entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere may see data mining as the great adventure of our times in which they involve themselves as in former times courageous businessmen did as they embarked in dangerous voyages. The difference: today's explorers take the entire mankind on board in their search for assets – not to make them all millionaires but to become millionaires at their expense. Petty concerns for privacy or cultural sustainability are only in the way of such spirit of discovery, just as the aged couple Philemon and Baucis in Goethe's play *Faust* stood in the way of modern business practices when they refused to give up their land for industrialization. To justify the "death" of those who stand in the way of "progress," an important part of the IT-industry business is the management of moods. The public has to be convinced of the entrepreneurs' good intentions: namely that their goal is to develop better products and to offer improved customer care. My analogies exaggerate, I admit. However, I really wonder whether we not only need more regulations of social life, as you indicate, but also against the spirit of homo faber that mercilessly changes the world regardless of any negotiations of and through limits.

**JD:** OMG, I have friends in SF who report with horror the overheard conversations of the opportunistic "entrepreneurs" who are seeking any way to create a new niche in the data stream (an app, a service, a new social media mode, a filter, anything). This is similar to the way advertisers dissected bodies into "zones" to which they targeted hygiene products, and of course in the data world, the zones can be sliced infinitely, to any granularity. Data derivatives replicate endlessly, without limit. Ethics? Can they be monetized?

**RS:** I absolutely agree, while for some time and to some people its gift economy imperative let the Internet appear as the last resort of communism, it in fact has become a playground of coveting and ruthless neo-liberalism. In this process even an important public good such as knowledge has been centralized in the hands of a private company such as Google. On the other hand, would the US government or the European Union ever have been able to carry out something like Google's book project? Should –and could– they run a search engine free of advertisement and with an algorithm visible to all who care?

**JD:** The Digital Public Library initiative, started as a visionary project by Robert Darnton, and now headed by Dan Cohen, is a perfect antidote to the problems posed by having Google control so much intellectual content as well as create so many data derivatives. Though DPLA will not deal its information, and seems to have no plans to monetize user profiles and patterns, it does offer a first and hopefully successful move towards a networked cultural heritage and access. Scientific and social-science data should also be part of this kind of repository. Private enterprise should be subject to regulation, scrutiny, and control, of course. But anyone who thought the internet was a gift economy is blind to the ways ease of consumption conceals the complexities (labor, costs, infrastructure) of production. To support digitally networked cultural heritage in any way that will carry forward more than a generation is going to require a public-private partnership at the scale of Carnegie Libraries in the early part of the 20th century. That was a hugely transformative undertaking, endowed by industrialist-turned-philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, but it coincided with tax funded support for public education, universal literacy, a public library system, and other initiatives. A few nationally funded projects show how transformative the commitment to infrastructure can be. Australia introduced a national broadband initiative, has a vital national library and cultural heritage/preservation programs, and its archivists have been at the forefront of international discussions about the rights of diverse communities. This is all far from Google and private interests. I think we need to reconcile various mythologies that have no real bearing on contemporary issues with the reality of actual possible futures—I know it sounds shockingly un-fun, but regulation, governance, shared responsibility and accountability, taxation, distribution of wealth, caps on income and profits, all these things are essential if education, information, power distribution, and sustainable futures are going to be made possible in any realm, including digital and traditional literacy. I'm a realist, not an idealist, and escalating inequities in every area of the culture need to be recalibrated.

### **Algorithm and Censorship**

**RS:** The numbers of views, likes, comments and the Klout Score – as measure of one's influence in social media– indicate the social extension of the technical paradigm of digital media: counting. The quantification of evaluation only seems to fulfill the cultural logic of computation, the dichotomy of like/dislike even to mirror the binary of its operational system. The desired effect of counting is comparison and ranking, i.e. the end of postmodern ambiguity and relativism. Does the trust in numbers in digital media bring about the technological solution to a philosophical problem? A Hollywood-like shift from the melancholia of the end of grand narratives and truth to the excitement of who or what wins the competition?

**JD:** Pretty pathetic as an image of our times, this return to the Roman Forum, thumbs up, thumbs down, court of public opinion and gladiatorial combat. Nishant Shah is eloquent on this topic, and has mustered vivid examples of the ways web-driven vigilantism and swarm-mob behavior can mete out injustice without any

control transferring socially mediated behavior into real world violence. As for counting as a metric, a measure of all things, it has to be balanced with statistical understanding, analytic tools from the quantitative domain, as well as with the tools of critical theory. A number is always relative, and even the first lesson in statistics—of median, mean, and mode—immediately calls attention to the *relative* value of a quantity. Combine this basic work in statistics with fundamentals in critical theory – a number is meaningful only in a scale, all scales are human-derived, based on some perceptual framework within a domain of knowledge or experience (body temperature, cycles of a day, a human lifespan, the speed of light, absolute or not, has value because it signifies a certain limit of what we imagine to be possible).

The grand narratives are all there, still, but being reconfigured by the pseudo-authority of computation, that set of mechanical exercises that passes itself off as irrefutable logic, as if it were not subject, like all logics, to a higher order of rhetoric. All statements of supposed fact are arguments about the belief system within which they gain their authority. That is simply Ideology 101, along with the other basic tenets of ideology: the more something appears to be natural, the more it is cultural; one has only to ask in whose interests it is for this "naturalness" to appear to be so to begin to unpack the power structures by which it is operating. Go back to the formulation about computational method and number and apply these basic tenets and suddenly the machinations of bureaucratic and managed culture appear unmasked, their grounds of authority revealed.

**RS:** No doubt that numbers too are not innocent. As book titles teach us: *"Raw Data" is an Oxymoron* (ed. Gitelman, MIT Press 2013). However, somehow the new technology (and its statistical mode) seems to promise the solution to an old political problem: to know and count the opinion of people. In fact, statistics may be considered the ideal advocate of democracy insofar as numbers avert the distortion of communication. Any utterance beyond a vote, any comment beyond a like or dislike, is a form of manipulation of the opinion, belief, feeling of others. Habermas celebrates this communicative action as discourse ethics, Rousseau, in his *Contrat Social*, considers debates and discussion as counter intuitive to democracy, since it aims at overcoming differences by rhetoric power if not political and economic power over media. We may not be able to say whether the numerical rationality is superior to the communicative. But we may agree that statistics allows for a shift from a kind of synthetic-discursive exclusion to syndetic-additive inclusion.

**JD:** Indeed, the relative virtue of quantitative reasoning is, well, just that--relative. I'm contrarian enough to suggest that statistical processes *are* discursive. Numbers seem discrete, referential, and delimiting, but that does not make their authority absolute. Their value is subject to cultural conditions even if they pretend otherwise. I'm reminded of the peculiar delusion that F.T. Marinetti entertained in thinking that mathematical symbols–the plus and minus sign–should replace syntactic terms because they were more precise. But of course, they are not, they are reductive, but thus, often, ambiguous, hence the paradox. Language need not be referential, but numbers, because they represent quantities, always are—even if the value of the referent may be ambiguous. For instance, what does "one" mean—it depends on the system of metrics within which it is operating, right? Modernism's struggles with syntax of all kinds (literary, musical, visual) was an attempt to open the possibility spaces of non-representational aesthetics, or at least, open forms of discourse.

**RS:** The personal and cultural cost of personalization in digital media is the loss of chance encounters, the preclusion of the unfamiliar, the removal of diversity and of what we are not (yet). The algorithm is the censor people more or less approve of and even desire. This becomes problematic once people are addressed not as consumers but as citizens expected to be open to others instead of cocooning in their bubble. Hence, personalization, driven by economic force, is political. Are the actual policy makers in the digital media age those who program ego-loops, inadvertently undermining the foundation of a democratic society?

**JD:** These questions hark back to earlier eras, degrees of collusion between desire-producing apparatuses and the subjects interpellated into their workings. What difference does it make whether we are discussing theater, flickering shadows in the cave, or the current screens? Human beings are addicted to the Symbolic, and the illusion it gives them of being somehow connected to the Other. The screens are just that, and I think we are in the era of the Grand Object A, rather than the Petit. The transactional object, the mechanism of illusion, the point of reference to which we are cathected in our Imaginary relations to the Real, has assumed gigantic proportions. Most people would give up food before they would give up their cell phones or internet connections, even though they are really only connected to a device. No self, only its fictive illusion within constructs of subjectivity, can be confirmed in such transactions. "Self" in this construction (now or in antiquity, from paleo-consciousness to the present) is a kind of specificity, a location, a unique address and identifier—not completely fictional, but rarely as "different" as imagined. Cocooning? Citizenship? Some incentive for participation will have to appear if the broad mass of people are going to see themselves as stakeholders. In our generation, the slogan "the personal is political" was used as a rallying cry, but now the difficulty is in convincing most younger voters that the "political can be personal" in any sense. And given recent Supreme Court decisions in the US that allow private interests to determine policy to an unprecedented degree, this is understandable. When money is speech, government works in the private interest and individuals as well as communities are disenfranchised. The connections between individual illusions/delusions, the pursuit of lifestyle over knowledge or experience, and the political sphere are complicated, and also have to meet the realities of motivation and activism.

**RS:** Facebook portrays the sharing of as much personal information as possible as the precondition for a better world. While the economic interests behind this data worship are undoubted and certainly need to be addressed, the question remains as to why younger generations don't seem to care about privacy but establish, using Facebook millionfold day-to-day, radical transparency as the new foundation of our culture. Is the data-exhibitionism of digital natives the contemporary version to the sexual revolution of the 1960s?

**JD:** I love the phrase "data worship" but I don't see the parallel with 1960s sexual revolutionary activity. We were given permission and we took it. We lived uninhibited lives without fear remember this was pre-AIDS, and in the most permissive use of contraception. I don't use Facebook, though I have an account, it lies dormant.  If I were to run for public office, my private life would be a field day for the news media—I/we did everything, with whomever and whatever we wanted. I once lived with a cat who wanted to have sexual relations with me. At a certain point in my conditioned resistance to his advances, I had to ask myself what my problem was with his desires? I did not give in, in the end, but it did make me think about the proscriptions in place. I was raised by a Calvinist in a Jewish household, so showing anything to anyone or being the least bit conspicuous or desirous of attention was simply not permitted. American culture is built on these kinds of deep prohibitions. I don't believe in mortifying the flesh. In a full life, one lives erotically in all dimensions of the daily encounter with the world—not screwing everything that comes along (though that's just fine by me too, if that's what someone wants to do), but living a sensually aware and fully ecstatic state of being. If only we could sustain that kind of intensity in our relation to the world. But would you want to live that way in public? What difference does it make? Notions of privacy, propriety, decorum, are all historically and culturally set. Eros is a state of body-mind. So much is shut down, put away, prohibited and circumscribed within human experience. Why?

**RS:** Your words first of all remind of what two older Germans said about the value of privacy. The sociologist Georg Simmel declared a century ago: 'The secret is one of man's greatest

achievements'; the writer Peter Handke admitted three decades ago: 'I live off of what the others don't know about me'. Secondly, one wonders what will be the consequences if we all live our lives in the public eye. There is the hope that if all the skeletons in the closet (and the cats under the blanket) are known, nobody will cast the first stone and what had been considered sinful will finally turn out to be a social habit. However, there is also the fear that life in the age of transparency and search engines will rather be as two younger Americans suggest: think of Marc Zuckerberg's nothing-to-hide-nothing-to-fear declaration and Eric Schmidt's warning 'If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.' What is your bet?

**JD:** I guess I think there is a difference between what can be known and what should be shown. The problem with too much exposure is aesthetic as much as moral—the banality of it makes so much information uninteresting, generic. Ask students to do a drawing of a chair and a coat and they all do something interesting, highly revealing, very personal. Ask them to show you their diaries/sketchbooks—they are shockingly similar. If every frog around the pond is speaking at night, who will listen? Time and attention, as we know, are the valuable commodities of our times. Competition for these will only grow. How many Karl Ove Knausgaard accounts do we need? How many Jenny Cams?

### **Art and Aesthetics**

**RS:** Nobody today speaks of *digital* art. Does this mean that digital art has ceased to exist or does it mean all art is digital?

**JD:** Gosh, no, not all art is digital! Lots of fine works of sculpture, painting, installation work, performance, drawing, and musical arts exist that have nothing to do with digital production. Just that the stigma of the "digital" went away so we can just think about the works as art—are they interesting, engaging, successful. We don't talk about oil paint art or instrumental art, so why emphasize a medium or technique?

**RS:** Well, if a medium has a message this message may also affect how we produce and perceive art. I would hold that computation, transformation, participation, and craftsmanship are some central aspects specific for the aesthetic of art born in digital media.

**JD:** Oh yes, I completely agree that there is a specificity to the ways digital production engages with conceptual, material, and aesthetic dimensions of production. But only some digital work is reflecting specifically on those aspects of process. I don't analyze every poem in terms of its use of typography, because many are so conventionally composed and laid out that the poet was clearly working within an already absorbed set of instructions for composition, not working with composition as a material aspect of their work. I think aesthetic is always about *how* something is made and thought, so in that sense, again, I agree. I just don't think every artist is reflecting on these issues in and as their production.

**RS:** People have said that art in or of digital media must be political even if its intentions are to be utterly formalistic. If art is based on technology the focus on form draws attention to how technology works and this is already an act of reflection or education. From this perspective, one would assume that digital literature is literature that addresses the politics of digital technology. What is your experience in this regard?

**JD:** All art is ideological, but that is different from saying it is political. All works engage with value systems and their operation, all artistic expressions are arguments for their forms (every novel is an argument about what a novel should/could be). Claims for the "political" are usually made for the most dull and didactic art, not work that actually makes for change or effects any structural transformation of power or process. The ideas that exposing the medium, calling attention to its machinations, showing how something makes meaning or effect—these are all features of modernist belief in epistemological defamiliarization. All fine and good, but the tediousness of didactic work plays into the worst neo-Liberalist affirmations, as the work of Claire Bishop,

among others, makes very strikingly clear. Who are we kidding? The tasks of reworking the ideologies that have come to prevail since the Reagan-Thatcher era are daunting. Technology is neither a cause nor an effect, but a historically coincident formation that works on certain faultlines, exaggerating tendencies and taking advantage of affordances. But technologies have to be adopted by receptive cultural conditions and ecologies. As to the politics of digital technology, that goes right back to the points I made above, about the way ideology works to conceal its workings.

**RS:** I agree with your favoring of the epistemological defamiliarization over didactic ambitions; as Adorno states in his essay on commitment and art: "If art is to live on, it must elevate social criticisms to the level of form, de-emphasizing social content accordingly". I would add, with Claire Bishop, that, on the other hand, even self-reflective art – such as the 'cozy situation' of a cooking-performance by Rirkrit Tiravanija – may actually pave the way for (neo-liberalist) affirmation. As for literature based on digital technology, academics have considered the option and need to navigate through a multi-linear hypertext as the replacement of the passive by the "active reader" thus implicitly praising mechanical activity over cerebral. Today electronic books and appropriate apps allow for "social reading": bookmarks and notes can be shared with other readers of the same text and conversation can start immediately. The words used to distinguish the new reading habits from the old claim a positive connotation. What could be wrong with being *interactive* and *social*? Why, our grandchildren may wonder once, would anybody want to withdraw a book from the others instead of sharing the reading experience, as it was common until the 18th Century? There are different ways of looking at the end of the cultural technique of immersive reading. What is your perspective?

**JD:** The distinction between active and passive reading modes does not depend on technology any more than 'chose your own adventure' type fiction depended on digital media. Torah reading is always active, situated within conversation and discussion. What is passive about that? The entire experience of the text is based on interpretation in a community. Some reading you want to do on your own. Social reading is useful for some things, but do we have to share everything? Technology that allows multiple readers to access a text simultaneously does not require shared commentary or conversation. As for combinatoric work or stories with variable endings, they were structured into the children's amusements known as *harlequinades* in the 19th century, and written into print based works, such as the exemplary Julio Cortázar work, *Hopscotch*, first published in 1963, twenty years before the wonderful *The Policeman's Beard is Half Constructured* (1984) was written by Racter, a program.

But the question of access is of course different from either interactive reception or combinatoric or hyperlinked composition. The reality that multiple copies of a work can be accessed simultaneously is great, but along with this privilege, we have to be vigilant about not losing the privileges that went with buying books—such as the right to circulate an individual copy after first sale and so on. Uniqueness doesn't always cancel circulation—the *Mona Lisa* exists in a single, unique canvas, but the original has been seen by many more people than most works created as artists' books in the spirit of the so-called "democratic multiple." Of course the whole mechanical reproduction and aura argument is relevant here too. DaVinci's portrait is a mass culture icon through its reproduction.

My point is simply that many claims for works, values, innovation, or advantages turn out to be more complicated—even contradictory—than at first glance. As for immersive reading, it is only one among many modes, but what computational techniques allow are certain processing skills that aggregate and synthesize results from corpora that are too large to go through using traditional reading modes. They point toward the places to do the close reading, as needed. The range of reading experiences may broaden, but reading as an experience remains, for now. Whether the alphabetic code will disappear as the central mode of linguistic transmission (it undergirds the internet) is another question altogether.

### **Media Literacy**

**RS:** Many observers of digital culture announce the shift from deep attention to hyper attention. The French philosopher Bernard Stiegler even speaks of a threat to social and cultural development caused by the destruction of young people's ability to develop deep and critical attention to the world around them. Is this academic nightmare justified? Or is this just another reiteration of a well-known lamentation about the terrifying ramifications of all new media?

**JD:** I tend to agree with Bernard Stiegler, though I would add that the single most shocking feature of the way people, young ones in particular, are living their lives is that they have no interior life and no apparent need or use for it. They live entirely social existences, always connected and in an exchange, no matter how banal, about the ongoing events of daily life. Reflection, meditation, imaginative musing, these are all missing, jettisoned, discarded and disregarded. Innovation, change, invention–these have always come from individuals who broke the mold, thought differently, pulled ideas into being in form and expression. Too much sociality leads to dull normativity.

**RS:** The birth of conventionalism out of the spirit of participation; this is a strong statement that many of the young will not be happy to hear. But lets drive your point even further. My thesis would be: People live entirely social lives for in the age of individualism life is too big to be absorbed alone. In (post)modern society where past and future have become unreliable concepts every moment takes on an intensity that is hard to bear. One lives in the here and now and permanently feels unequipped for an appropriate reaction. Without a rich interior life, without a reflection, meditation, and imaginative musing experiences – be it Venice, Grand Canyon, Da Vinci's *Mona Lisa* or the sudden rainbow – become indigestible bits we don't know what to do with: except posting them. The unquestioned imperative of sharing is the new way to live up to important and trivial moments alike. It forwards the moment experienced to others who will "solve it" with a number of likes. Sharing is a way to mask the horror vacui. If Blaise Pascal once, in the 17th century, stated: "all the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber" we may add today: people cannot only not be alone in an empty room they are also unable to cope by themselves with the events they encounter.

**JD**: Yes, well, there it is. I spend so much of my life alone and solitude is as important to me as water and air, it is the medium in which I breathe, that I am an anomaly. I have a horror of constant contact, of being used up, absorbed, taken out of the being-ness *in* life as lived. I so prefer to watch times of day shift to watching any programmed entertainment. I'm not much of a sharer, though I like real conversation, dialogue, and enjoy consuming the endless spectacle of daily life in its direct and mediated range of poignancies and follies. The horror of the real is the cruelty of the world, of human beings to each other, which is unspeakable. Mediation is the assurance that we are not the suffering ones, because they are the enunciated subjects. Hideous indeed. What glass do we think we are on the other side of? I wonder.

**RS:** Digital Humanities are a keyword in the current discussion about the present and future of the Humanities. It has many facets and, as the discussion suggests, at least a dark and a bright side. However, there seems to be very different notions of what digital humanities actually are. Some reduce it to digitized corpora or to the use of networks for communication, others include digital media studies. What is your perspective?

**JD:** I characterize Digital Humanities as work at the intersection of computational methods and the traditional humanities. The production of digitized corpora was and is one of the outcomes of this intersection. My standard line is to say that Digital Humanities is the cook in the kitchen and that Digital Media Studies is the restaurant critic. As far as I am concerned, you have to know how to do things and make things in order to be able to think arguments into being as works in any medium, analogue or digital. I would extend this by noting that much of my work in the last ten years has been part of an overarching argument that humanities *methods* as well as humanities *content*—that the humanistic approach to knowledge is fundamentally interpretative, observer-dependent, situated culturally and historically, necessarily partial, constrained by circumstances, tolerant of ambiguity.

This puts my approach at odds with computational techniques and approaches to knowledge that imagine user independent approaches, repeatable results, universal and absolute objects produced by empirical inquiry. I don't include classroom technology, online learning, or critical media studies in Digital Humanities, though these are closely related fields and each is of value. Digital Humanities has become too obsessed with definition, and is at risk of becoming a service field without intellectual content or problems. I think Andrew Prescott has pointed this out as well, asking where are the intellectual contributions of Digital Humanities now that we are almost two decades into the field? I keep insisting that until a project in Digital Humanities has produced work that has to be cited by its home discipline— American History, Classics, Romantic Poetry, etc.—for its *argument* (not just as a resource)—we cannot claim that DH has really contributed anything to scholarship.

**RS:** If you don't include critical media studies in Digital Humanities, I as a media theorist who considers the critical discussion of the cultural implications of new technologies as a central part of media literacy hope there will be room and funding for such digital media studies besides the trendy Digital Humanities. I am afraid the focus on the making and managing of information could eventually override the traditional characteristic of humanities to question knowledge. For many graduates in the humanities the promised land meanwhile seems to be what has been discussed as Alternative Academic Careers for Humanities Scholars. I have the feeling this direction further promotes the shift from critical media studies to affirmative media management.

**JD:** The #AltAc discussion has indeed introduced confusions as well. In some ways, #AltAc is a sideways step into the work that librarians and information professionals have done for years. But it brings the design and development of platforms and project technology in the humanities into the equation. How else would we have tools like Zotero, or Neatline, or Omeka if we didn't have humanist-technologists committed to their development? But suggesting it is an alternative *academic* track sends the wrong message to the public and to administrators—it is a *professional* one, I think. The research done in an #AltAc mode is not discipline specific. The distinction is important because substantive, discipline-specific humanities research needs support. If you are working all year in an admin position, especially if you are also teaching, the research you do may be in platform and tool development but you don't have the time, hours in the day, to become an expert in the Romantic fragment and poetics, or the interpretation of the eco-political impact of the Norman conquest, or the construction of celebrity in 18th century French culture.

They are different kinds of work. I'm happy to work with my colleagues in the Library. They are dedicated professionals, but they are not "alt" anything, they are people whose work is premised on a subject specialization and on expertise in professional areas. These are essential skills. Most #AltAc advocates are not trained information professionals, they are in administrative positions trying to catch up with what MLIS programs teach, while trying to develop humanities-oriented services and platforms. That is a specific kind of research in the professional arena. Either path is consuming. Domain-specific research takes a lifetime of accumulated knowledge and dedication, continued attention to developments in the field, among peers, and it produces new knowledge. It cannot be done around the edges of fulltime administrative work. Research into platforms, protocols, data management, design—these are also legitimate, but they belong to the information domain, not the humanities. Creating the impression that humanities research can be done on "one's own time" around the edges of full-time work plays right into the current diminishment of respect for the humanities. This is not in the interest of Digital Humanities or anyone else. We need Digital Humanities professionals, not diminished academics.

**RS:** Against the 'default position that the humanities are in "crisis",' in the 2012 book *Digital\_Humanities* you and your coauthors Anne Burdick, Peter Lunefeld, Todd Presner, and Jeffrey Schnapp portray the computational turn in Humanities as an opportunity of bringing the 'values, representational and interpretative practices, meaning-making strategies, complexities, and ambiguities of being human into every realm of experience and knowledge of the world.' As one of those values, you suggest 'thinking beyond received positions and claims to absolute authority' supporting 'a genuine multiverse in which no single point of view can claim the center.' How do you bring relativism and multi-perspectivism into a world of quantifying methods and algorithmic analysis? What obstacles do you see?

**JD:** A simple demonstration to show the multiverse is to imagine a faceted interface that allows us to see a collection of artifacts from a variety of perspectives. Consider an online museum displayed through a set of filters that organize and select objects according to different criteria: the knowledge of an original collector, a scheme of standard metadata from a western perspective, in accord with a classification scheme from an indigenous community, and so on. Each structuring organization offers a different argument, different set of hierarchies and values in its presentation. The quantitative or disambiguating underpinnings don't have to determine what happens at the level of display, and the parallax of comparative views into data or organizations structured into data take apart the singularity that is the usual perspective of a monograph. Imagine a view into a spatial representation of Rome—show it to me as Augustus saw it, as Michaelangelo saw it, as Mussolini saw it—think about the spatialization of power and its connection to point of view, daily routines, routes, events. The city stops being a given. It stops being a singularity, and turns into a multiplicity of perspectives, each of which is experiential.

For more than a decade, I've been working on using digital techniques for modelling temporalities, and that work has investigated highly subjective models of experiential time, referential time (from documents), relative time, and other modes that can't be expressed in timelines borrowed from the empirical sciences. Most recently I've been working on the graphical expression of irreconcilable chronologies in the history of writing and the alphabet, particularly in the late 18th century, just on the cusp of geological reckoning with the ages of the world, its formation, and evolution. This is a time when biblical chronologies and Olympiads were the two stable reference systems for any historical event, but historical records and actual chronologies also existed. Prehistory was a mystery, unfathomable, though controversies reigned about whether people existed before Adam. This is half a century before geological discoveries and evolution upset the entire belief system. When you think that within a hundred years, theories of the birth of the universe, big bang, galaxy formation, and the understanding of the millions of years through which the earth and its species formed would all be articulated, it is mind-boggling. So how do we model these knowledge systems, show their distinctions and differences, not as errors, but as rhetorics, as argument structures?

These are tasks well-suited to the mutable conditions of display within a digital environment, I think, though we will have to let go of the attachment to easy, reductive eye-candy that has been the stuff of information visualizations as they have been inherited from the natural sciences and brought into the digital humanities. The intellectual and epistemological problems in using visualizations are many, beginning with a fundamental fallacy about representation—that an image can "be" in a relation of equivalence or identity with that which it claims to represent. Many other fallacies follow from this, but we went through decades of deconstruction and post-structuralism and seem to have forgotten all of the lessons we learned as we (humanists) rush to uncritical engagement with methods from other fields. When you realize that language has many modalities—interrogative and conditional, for instance—but that images are almost always declarative, you begin to see the problems of representation inherent in information visualizations. They are statements, representations (i.e. highly complex constructions and mediations) that offer themselves as presentation (self-evident statements). This is an error of epistemology, not an error of judgment or method.

**RS:** The unlearning of deconstruction and post-modernism, this is what I meant above when portraying the quantitative turn as the epistemological happy end that overcomes the relativism and ambiguity of postmodernism. As for the difference between language and images you point out, the book also states that Digital Humanities 'necessarily partakes and contributes to the "screen culture" of the 21ST century' – which you already stated in your project *Wittgenstein's Gallery* in which you take qualities specific to images and see how they could work in texts, and vice versa. *Digital\_Humanities* admits to the tension between the visual and the textual, but doesn't accept an either/or approach nor the subordination of the one to the other. However, as you just stated it, the visual and the textual are two very different systems of signification and communication. To quote yourself at a symposium on Digital Humanities in Hong Kong in 2014: a word doesn't cast a shadow and an image can't be conjugated. You have extensively worked on the visual of the textual, as it were. How do you see the collaboration of both in this context? What role should visual studies or rather the study of visual communication play in Digital Humanities?

**JD:** I was at a dinner party this year with a very senior and rightfully esteemed scholar of visuality, an equally senior literary critic, and a younger poet who suggested that images and texts are 'now the same', because they both appeared on the screen display as pixels.  Might as well say that images and texts printed in ink on newsprint are the same order of thing because they are produced in the same medium. Text and image are processed in different parts of our brains and by different means. More than 50% of primate cerebral cortex activity is given to visual experience, and this is dramatic by contrast to that of other animals. What is striking to me is that we do not have a field called visual epistemology, no dedicated discipline.