a confession to make. Many of you may have been brought here
under false pretenses.
of the talk I had intended to present today was "From Homer
to the Holodeck," drawing its inspiration from one of the mottoes
of MIT's new Master's Program in Comparative Media Studies.
Instead, I logged onto the conference's website a few days ago
to discover that you think I am giving a talk entitled "From
Home to the Holodeck."
to use this miscommunication, somewhat opportunistically, as
an object lesson for some of the points I am going to make over
the next few moments. The new digital media enables communication
and collaboration across once insurmountable distances. It allows
us to send messages in the blink of an eye from Cambridge, MA,
to Sydney, NSW, but it also allows us to misunderstand each
other with the click of a keyboard.
be cautious that our words are understood in relation to their
own particular local contexts. I am acutely aware at the moment
that I am speaking to you from one context, bound-up with my
own experiences as an American academic enmeshed in my country's
political and cultural struggles, reflecting upon the resources
and opportunities emerging in our economic situation. However,
you are hearing my words in a very different context, shaped
by Australia's own struggles with multiculturalism, globalism,
and technological development.
am reminded of Sandy Stone's observation that digital theory
is "thoroughly experimental and subject for recall, for factory
modification, at any time," recognizing that my ideas are provisional,
awaiting word from you whether they make any sense from an Australian
perspective.  If in part, to reflect upon
the role which the humanities and social sciences will play
in the 21st century, we need to be pretty clear where we are
going and where we are coming from.
Homer to the Holodeck
I had meant
for the title, From Homer to the Holodeck to express
a continuity across residual, dominant and emerging forms of
media and thus my belief that even the most traditional forms
of humanism have enormous contributions to make in response
to our current era of media transformation.
My MIT colleague, Janet
Murray recently published a book, Hamlet
on the Holodeck, which makes significant contributions
to contemporary debates about the role of the humanities in
the digital age.  In the course of her career,
Murray has gone from being a scholar of Victorian women writers
to being a research scientist working in a center for educational
computing, and her book expresses the relationship she sees
emerging between these two worlds. Digital media are increasingly
central to all aspects of our modern life, as the computer has
shifted from a calculation tool into a cornerstone of contemporary
regards this shift to be a cultural revolution on the same order
of magnitude as the introduction of the printing-press or the
emergence of modern mass media in the late 19th and early 20th
century. This media transformation unleashes new artistic potentials,
opens new spaces for storytelling and cultural expression, and
introduces new models for representing social and cultural relations.
Her book outlines the aesthetics of an art form which does not
yet exist, an art form whose parameters are starting to emerge
from the early efforts of game designers, webmasters, and computer
programmers, as they explore what the computer can do and pave
the way for the "cyberbards" who are to come.
in her title refers to the futuristic interactive and immersive
technologies imagined by Star Trek, which she feels offers the
most compelling contemporary representation of this robust,
new storytelling medium. Her phrasing, however, suggests that
what is to come does not represent a profound break with the
past. Shakespeare still matters in the world of the holodeck
and the challenge is to find contemporary forms as complex and
compelling on their own terms. Throughout her book, she explores
earlier antecedents for interactive or nonlinear fiction, reassessing
Tristram Shanty or the Bronte Sister's collaborative
storytelling practices, suggesting that the new digital media
may represent a fulfillment of dreams held by earlier generations
of artists and storytellers.
she writes, "promises to reshape the spectrum of narrative expression,
not by replacing the novel or the movie, but by continuing their
timeless bardic work within another framework." She ends the
book with a call to make sure that we get digital tools into
the hands of our greatest contemporary storytellers, and insisting
that humanists should not turn their back on technology.
Home to the Holodeck
the title, From Home to the Holodeck, suggests something
very different -- placing greater emphasis upon discontinuity,
radical change and uncertain futures, on a movement from a familiar
place (the home) to an alien one (the holodeck). "From Home
to the Holodeck" evokes the sort of oppositions between the
domestic culture of books and the technological culture of computers,
which run through Sven Birkerts' The
Guttenberg Elegies, a work that I take to be emblematic
of an alternative response which many humanists are taking towards
contemporary computer culture. Birkerts
fears for the culture of the book, which he sees as foundational
for the whole humanist tradition.
the book embodies "knowledge, wisdom, tradition, cultivation
and inwardness," the values he associates with Enlightenment
humanism. Its displacement from the center of our culture represents
an "erosion" of those core values which may be fatal to the
humanist traditions he seeks to defend. He casts readers as
members of an embattled minority, struggling to preserve the
best of human culture from the chaos of the contemporary information
society. He is horrified by the web, which he sees as a realm
of disordered data and fragmented facts circulating outside
of any predetermined context; the computer sets a pace for decision-making
which denies any possibility of quiet contemplation.
the book culture dwells within the home, the parlor and the
library, while the computer represents an invading force which
has taken possession of our lives and allows no time for human
reflection. In many ways, Birkerts' critique of computers is
ironic, since humanism rose to cultural prominence and institutional
stability on the back of another communications revolution,
the advent of print culture, but now casts itself against subsequent
waves of technological change.
and Birkerts represent two very different visions of how the
humanities should respond to technological change. Murray proposes
a vision of the humanities as empowered by emerging technologies,
which allow us to fulfill long-standing missions and to move
into new spaces, to go where no humanist has gone before. Birkerts
offers us a vision of the humanities as embattled against emerging
technologies which threaten to destroy core values and practices.
Murray's vision is utopian; Birkerts' apocalyptic. Birkerts
equates humanism with the culture of the book; Murray envisions
humanism as transcending the book and taking new forms as the
culture changes around it.
at stake in this exchange is whether the job of the humanist
will be defined as that of being a custodian of the past or
an inventor of the future, whether we will seize the opportunities
offered by the digital revolution or whether we will sink beneath
the waves of change. Another influential
humanist, James J. O'Donnell, writes, "The genuine spirit of
our culture is not expressed in applying small pieces of celotape
to hold together the structure we have received, but in pitching
in joyously to its ongoing reconstruction." 
new millennium approaches, humanists around the world are engaged
in some serious soul-searching. We are trying to understand
how our field of study has been bound-up with the historical
culture of the book, trying to imagine how we will respond to
fundamental shifts in the base technologies of communication,
education, and storytelling, and trying to decide what our mission
should be in an increasing multicultural society, a growingly
global culture and a rapidly changing economy. I want to identify
at least seven models of the digital revolution which circulate
in contemporary discourse:
Revolution - the transformation of atoms into bytes, in Nicholas
Negroponte's terms, the convergence of all existing media
into one single technology with enormous transformative and
Revolution - the emergence of new forms of communities emerge
in response to the collapse of traditional institutions, or
the increased mobility of modern life (as in Howard
Rheingold's arguments about The Virtual Community), or
the development of new forms of identity as we construct personas
free of biological determinants (as in the work of Sherry
Turkle or Donna
Revolution - the free circulation of ideas in a realm where
the traditional gatekeepers no longer hold power and personalized
"first-choice" media displace the centralized "technology
of tyrants" (as in George
Revolution - the transformation of teaching and the creation
of more learner-centered environments (as in the arguments
advanced by Seymour
Revolution - the creation of more democaratic forms of decision-making
founded on the participatory qualities of interactive media
technologies (as in the work of Lawrence
Revolution - the collapse of barriers between cultures and
of the ideological logic behind the modern nation state due
to increased communication potential of digital media (as
in John Perry Barlow's Declaration
of Independence in Cyberspace.)
Revolution - a shift towards home-based employment and telecommuting,
towards a new economy in which smaller start-ups compete with
massive corporations through e-commerce, in a phase defined
by lower barriers of entry into the marketplace.
breakdown of different versions of the Digital Revolution suggests
are the following points:
of radical change are surfacing on both the right and the
left, as well as from writers like Barlow, whose politics
don't really fit within classical ideological categories.
- The whole
rhetoric of "revolutionary change" points towards some basic
dissatisfactions with the state of contemporary life. The
computer is posited as a utopian agent of transformation,
capable of either restoring or renewing traditional social
formations (the virtual community, the global village) or
introducing new modes of interaction which respond to historic
anxieties, frustrations, and desires (cyborg feminism).
for digital transformation are closely linked to anxieties
or dystopian dread about the direction change might take.
The whole rhetoric of "revolution" encourages counter-revolutionaries
who react against what they perceive to be a coming reign
of terror, who feel so invested in traditional structures
that they are threatened by the thought of their dissolution
humanistic response to this process must keep alive the myth
of social, cultural, political, intellectual, and economic change
embodied in the fantasy of a digital revolution. After all,
utopian fantasy is an important element within any political
movement. We need to be able to envision alternatives to the
current situation in order to motivate change, and it is by
envisioning alternatives that the inadequacies of the status
quo become apparent. If, for example, we did not have an ideal
of universal access to digital media, then the current barriers
to access, which block certain groups from participating in
cyberspace, would not be perceived as a serious flaw.
other hand, we need to maintain a critical perspective on change
which allows us to measure the gap between the myths and the
realities, which tests arguments about cyberdemocracy against
the realities of racial inequality in access to digital technologies,
which pits claims about a new cultural realm without gatekeepers
against patterns of corporate consolidation and oligopoly. The
best way to conduct such a conversation is by avoiding the either-or
logic that the myth of a digital revolution encourages.
collective statement, the Techno-realism
Manifesto, advocates a middle-ground position where
technological critics adopt a stance like that of a food critic
or a film critic, debating the merits and limitations of specific
local developments rather than getting bogged down in endless
debates between extreme positions of technological utopianism
and luddite reaction. After all, food critics aren't asked constantly
to defend the existence of food or decide whether its overall
impact is harmful or beneficial to society. Rather, they are
allowed to make distinctions between a good meal and a bad one
and to articulate standards by which one could reach such a
judgment. What I am calling the New Humanism here, is intended
in that same spirit.
a New Humanism
at a vital moment in the history of our disciplines, which offers
rich possibilities for expanding our public profile, broadening
our intellectual mission, deepening our theoretical perspectives,
forming alliances with both traditional humanists and technical
experts at our own institutions, enabling new international
collaborations, and enlarging the job market for our students.
The public responds to these alternative visions of digital
revolution with a mixture of fascination and fear, uncertain
how to judge which scenario seems more likely or farfetched.
They are susceptible to sensationalistic claims and shoddy research.
Never before has there been such a great need for a new form
of expertise which is alert to the social and cultural consequences
of media technology, pragmatic in its response to the potentials
and dangers of change and articulate enough to explain these
processes to the general public.
moment, changes are being fueled by technological developments
rather than being shaped by a serious consideration of what
kind of new society we hope to create. When this happens, technological
developments often lose touch with the shape of human life.
like to make an analogy between the current development of digital
media and the history of the doll industry in the United States.
In the late 19th century, the toy industry faced a problem --
doll heads were most often made from china or ceramic bisque
and were easily breakable.  The Edison corporation
took this as a technological problem, seeking to develop a doll's
head which would absolutely not break, drawing on new industrial
materials. The result was the cast-iron baby doll.
response emerged from small female-run companies which often
had on-grounds day-care facilities, so they were developing
their products in a human context of everyday life. They drew
on what they knew as wives and mothers about children's culture
, and in the process, they explored the possibility of making
dolls heads from Indian rubber -- a much more user-friendly
the isolation of humanities and engineering results in the creation
of the digital equivalent of the cast-iron baby doll as we rush
to solve technological problems and exploit new materials without
a grasp of the cultural and social contexts in which the products
are being used. The best answers will come from breaking down
this false separation between humanism and technology, so that
technological questions are framed and answered in human terms,
a theme that will resurface later in this talk.
respond to the digital revolution by offering ever more elaborate
and impassioned defenses of our libraries, as if the emergence
of a new media necessarily meant the death toll of the book,
we will destroy our credibility and blunt our effectiveness
as interpreters and critics of contemporary culture.
to propose an alternative model of humanism which does not see
its future bound to a single technology or medium. This new
humanism is defined through its flexibility and fluidity, its
ability to think across media, and its willingness to pragmatically
engage with the core issues shaping the modern era. This new
humanism will be based on interdisciplinary collaborations which
enable us to combine expertise to confront new problems rather
than continuing the divide-and-conquer politics of academic
turf wars, which direct our attention inward, when we should
be assuming increased public roles.
past several years, the MIT Media
in Transition Project has sponsored forums which bring
together journalists and activists interested in the impact
of digital media upon contemporary society with historians engaged
in the study of earlier periods, when media underwent profound
shifts. What has emerged from such conversations is a much more
complex account of cultural and technological change. The potentials
of a new medium are shaped by its introduction into specific
social, cultural, legal, economic, and political contexts which
partially determine both the ways it will be used and the effects
it will have.
brought together urban designers with the developers of contemporary
video games so that they could examine our emerging fantasies
about urban and pastoral environments and compare notes on how
we might design new environments to better suit human needs.
We have invited historians of the press, such as Michael
Schudson, to debate the ways that our concept of the "informed
citizen" has been shaped by shifts in information technologies.
also asked contemporary science
fiction writers, ranging from Octavia
Butler to Bruce Sterling, to reflect upon the assumptions
about media technologies which run through their fictions, recognizing
science fiction's traditional responsibility to popularize debates
about scientific discovery and technological change. We have
sought, in this fashion, to shift the focus of the conversation
away from interactive technologies and towards human interactions
suggest a series of core conclusions:
- New communications
are consistently met by competing rhetorics of utopian promise
and apocalyptic change. Such debates about the nature of new
media force into question many of the core institutions and
practices of a culture and thus, initiate a process of widespread
change, however, is ultimately evolutionary rather than revolutionary,
shaped less by a logic of technological determinism than through
complex social and cultural negotiations. Often, the first
uses of new technologies are fundamentally conservative, testing
the potentials of the new technology against the achievements
of previous media.
for a moment the Gutenberg Bible, that great artifact of
the print revolution. It is significant that it is the Bible,
a work which was central to the cultural economy of the
scribal or manuscript culture, which preceded print. Second,
it is a cultural hybrid which took almost two years to produce,
with a combination of hand-illumination and printed type
almost every page. Third, the standards by which the Bible
would have been judged, would have been those set for illuminated
manuscripts. If it was not at least as beautiful an artifact
as those produced at the monasteries, it would have been
rejected as a failed experiment.
the distribution of new media is uneven and gradual, blocked
by other material and social factors. In the case of the print
revolution, these factors would have included the initially
high cost of paper and the slow and uneven spread of literacy.
- Our ideas
about dramatic change often mask the existence of hybrid or
alternative media which help to mediate between the old and
new forms. For example, our contemporary discussions of the
shift from orality to literacy often ignore the role of pictorial
forms, which helped to mediate between the two cultural systems.
Tapestry, for example, served both the needs of the monks
who were invested in the alphabetic culture and the needs
of the peasants who were still dwelling within a predominantly
emerged through these conversations is a new approach to media
education which we call "Comparative Media Studies." [link to:
TBA] Comparative Media Studies is understood as the humanistic
and social scientific study of the cultural, social, political,
economic, and aesthetic consequences of mediated communications.
Media Studies brings together scholars working on parallel tracks
in art history, theatre studies, comparative literature, journalism,
film and television studies, digital communications, and a range
of other related fields, searching for common grounds, as well
as, exporting modes of analysis from one medium to another.
Forms of Comparative Media Studies are emerging at many American
universities, taking different names or emphasis to reflect
the reality of pre-existing institutional resources or local
of such a perspective becomes clear when we reconsider the way
that the emergence of digital media is persistently framed as
a potential threat to the survival of the book and its legacy
in the humanities. Often arguments such as Birkerts' imply that
the relations between media amounts to a zero-sum game, in which
one medium always dominates and displaces the technologies which
phase of media transformation has added new communication tools,
new structures of media ownership, new forms of cultural power,
but never fully displaced the forms of media which preceded
it. Once introduced, media are remarkably resilient, shifting
in and out of cultural centrality, acquiring or discarding different
functions, transmitting alternative kinds of content, but rarely
disappearing altogether. Even today, one can, for example, send
a telegram, though telegraphy no longer has the centrality in
our culture which it once had.
one of the earliest form of mass media, continues to have enormous
political influence, as demonstrated by the powerful role played
by conservative talk show hosts in organizing sustained opposition
to the Clinton Administration, despite electoral victories,
and the introduction of Realaudio technologies -- that is, of
digital radio -- has the potential to transform radio yet again.
I have students at MIT who use digital media to listen into
radio broadcasts from their mother countries in Bosnia or Serbia,
much as an earlier generation would have struggled to cut through
the static and hear distant signals on their shortwave radios.
dead delivery technologies -- the old wax cylinders of the early
phonograph, the 8-track tapes of the 1970s -- but there are
no dead media. Despite a succession of different forms of transmission,
we still maintain a medium of recorded sound which plays some
central roles in our culture.
if we look at three primary institutions of literary culture
(the book, the letter, the newspaper), the results are far more
complicated. On-line bookstores, such as Amazon.com,
are extending the circulation of books of all kinds into regions
which previously had little or no access to good bookstores,
and in the process, providing forums for the discussion of books,
offering opportunities for readers to exchange their evaluations
with each other, creating intelligent agents which can help
us locate books which meet our needs, but which we would not
have discovered otherwise, and linking critical commentary about
books from multiple intellectual and ideological perspectives
with access to the books themselves.
fascination of the young with the digital realm represents a
return to a more literate culture, a world where one's ability
to express oneself clearly through written language is valued
as central to the process of courtship or to one's status within
peer culture. The letter, which had been largely a moribund
form in the middle part of the 20th century, is re-emerging
as central to our processes of social connectivity. Much as
with the print revolution, the growth of the Internet depends
upon the expansion of literacy skills.
of digital media upon that other key institution of print culture,
the newspaper, is apt to be more complicated. A decade ago,
many had predicted that the newspaper might well have outlived
its usefulness, having become essentially the information institution
of choice only for aging baby-boomers and losing its ability
to connect with younger readers. Jon Katz has noted that the
average American, below the age of 35, gets the bulk of their
information about the world around
them from nontraditional sources, from the net and the web,
from rap songs and music videos, from topical sitcoms and stand-up
routines on late night television.  In short,
the realm of news, entertainment, information and popular culture
becomes increasingly difficult to separate from each other.
initial excitement about the digital revolution, some proclaimed
a world where "information must be free," and all citizens would
have direct access to the information necessary for making their
own decisions about key governmental institutions. Increasingly,
however, there has emerged a new respect for the fact-gathering
and processing structures of traditional journalism. While the
Net is enabling many new voices to be heard and providing a
forum for challenging traditional journalism's representations
of the world, it may also result in a renewed respect for the
political and cultural productivity of journalism as a system
for ordering information. The language and structure of journalism
may shift, as occurred, for example, with the rise of the telegraph,
which introduced the concept of the inverted pyramid and the
lead paragraph. But the long-term viability and centrality of
professional journalism remains clear.
are talking about a realm of personalized newspapers, which
only offer us information that we have programmed our agents
to seek out, but such a world would be a later-day Babel where
we could not communicate with each other because our personal
newspapers did not construct for us comparable social and cultural
realities. We depend upon journalists to force onto our agendas
questions, issues, political structures, individuals, and geographic
locations we did not previously know we cared about, and we
will depend all the more on this agenda-setting role in a world
of ever-expanding information flows.
however, are discovering new audiences as they move on-line.
One of the first publications to create its own website, the
Jose Mercury, has found that it has gained new status
as a national or even international news source competing alongside
national newspapers such as the New York Times or USA
Today. At first, publishers imagined that the primary interest
in web-based versions of their publications would lie in college
students who wanted to maintain some links to their home towns,
but they are discovering a far broader array of people are drawn
to their sites.
As a result,
they are reassessing what the mission of the local newspaper
is and how they might position themselves in response to a broader
national or even international readership. One new model might
be the development of niche-oriented sections in their publications
which build upon the pre-existing strengths of their reporters
and their regional identifications. In the North American contexts,
one can imagine a world where we read educational news in the
Boston Globe, political news in the Washington Post,
entertainment news in the LA Times, and economic news
in the Wall Street Journal.
ownership, sparked by shifts in media regulation in the United
States, is giving rise to a situation where journalists are
increasingly thinking across media, looking for ways to present
information which fully exploit the diverse potentials of television,
print, and web based reporting. The computer has not destroyed
the newspaper, but rather it has shifted its functions and its
relationship to its core constituencies.
media will not simply displace existing communications technologies;
television, film, radio, recorded music, publishing will continue
to co-exist with emerging forms of media and will play a central
role in defining the functions digital media plays in our lives.
and Cultural Convergence
disciplines have often been defined around a single dominant
media technology -- literature around books, journalism around
print, cinema studies around motion pictures, and so forth.
What is required for the new humanism, however, is the ability
to train students to think across media, to recognize that there
has never been a point in human history when a single medium
operated in isolation.
the wilder claims made about digital media have emerged from
a refusal to examine closely the existing configuration of media,
to understand the likely future interactions between broadcast
networks and the Internet, for example. Media are converging
at the site of production and at the site of reception. At the
present, one of the central questions we need to confront is
the relationship between centralized broadcast media, like television,
and grassroots, participatory media, like the Internet.
We might understand
this distinction in terms of two famous political slogans of the
1960s, both drawn from the American context. First is the Gil
Scott Herron song, "The Revolution will not be Televised." Herron's
point was that a corporate controlled, narrow pipeline media-like
network television is unlikely to embrace the currents of social,
cultural and political change. But ask yourself whether the revolution
will be digitized and the answer is rather different. Fringe groups
of all kinds are among the first to go on-line and to exploit
the Net's participatory potential to get out messages which cannot
circulate through broadcast media.
other hand, student protesters during the 1968 Chicago riots
chanted to the network news trucks that, "the whole world is
watching," secure in the knowledge that if their experiences
were televised, they would reach viewers around the world and
that they would be outraged by the police's behavior. Ask yourself
if there is any place on the web where one can say that the
whole world is watching. We have gained access to a broad-based
participatory media at the expense of being able to direct the
attention of the larger public or to get our ideas onto the
prediction is a future in which the broadcast media continue
to function as agenda setters, sparking a range of popular responses
which are communicated via the Net, while the Net will be the
place where new, controversial or innovative ideas surface and
gain their most dramatic impact when they are embraced and recirculated
through mainstream broadcast media.
discussions of technological convergence, that is, the integration
of existing communications technologies into a single mega-system,
need to be framed in relation to what I call "cultural
convergence." Anyone who wants to see what convergence looks
like should visit my house and watch my adolescent son, sprawled
on the living room rug, watching a baseball game on our big-screen
television, listening to techno on his cd-player, and writing
e-mail to his friends or doing homework on his laptop. At the
moment, the technologies aren't talking to each other. They're
on different sides of the room. But, it doesn't really matter
very much in cultural terms, since, as consumers, we are already
using different media and their contents in relation to each
are starting to refer to the "N Generation," the "Net Generation,"
or "Gen.Com", children who have come of age in relation to interactive
technologies and digital media and who operate under the rather
bold assumption that they can be active participants shaping,
creating, critiquing and circulating popular culture.
convergence refers to the process by which people in their everyday
life use media in relation to each other, form evaluations about
which media best serves specific purposes, assemble information
across multiple channels of communication, and embrace artworks
which depend upon appropriation and remixing of cultural materials
or upon the archiving and recirculating of previous media texts.
My argument is that in order to predict the effects of our current
moment of technological convergence of media delivery systems,
we need to look closely at the patterns of media consumption
which have preceded technological changes and created a public
appetite for a more flexible interaction with media technologies.
Humanism and Vernacular Theory
Winner has called for computer professionals to take responsibility
for their own actions and to help enlarge public debates surrounding
the design and implementation of new communications and information
technologies: "Right now it's anyone's guess what sorts of personalities,
styles of discourse, and social norms will ultimately flourish
in these new settings...We can predict, though, that American
society will continue to exclude ordinary citizens from key
choices about the design and development of new technologies,
including information systems. Industrial leaders present as
fait accomplis what otherwise might have been choices open for
diverse public imaginings, investigations and debates.... People
doing research on computing and the future could have a positive
influence in these matters.
we're asking people to change their lives to adapt to new information
systems, it seems responsible to solicit broad participation
in deliberation, planning, decision making, prototyping, testing,
evaluation and the like." 
conversation necessarily involves more than engineers or industrialists
since it cuts to core questions about culture, community, and
democracy, questions which are at the heart of the historic
mission of the humanities.
such questions, however, we must break free from the tendency
towards professionalization, which has griped the humanities
in recent years. I recognize that in Australia, there has remained
a strong tradition of academic engagement in debates about social
and cultural policy, but in the American context, there has
been a tendency of humanism to frame its arguments in ever more
specialized language, largely free of any responsibility to
translate what it has discovered about contemporary culture
into a language more widely accessible to popular audiences.
We have lost sight of our historic roles as "paraphrasers" or
"translators" who open up intellectual debates to larger communities,
who act as bridges between different communities or diverse
bodies of knowledge.
comments suggest, the process of theorizing digital media is
occurring outside, as well as, inside the university and these
conversations (and the subsequent decisions which grow out of
them) will occur with or without our input.
McLaughlin has offered the term "vernacular theory" to refer
to theorizing outside the academy,
offering compelling case studies of the different modes of theory-formation
among school teachers, advertising executives, fans, media activists
or new age visionaries.  McLaughlin understands
theory to be any attempt to make meaningful generalizations
for interpreting or evaluating local experiences and practices.
Vernacular theory abounds in the digital realm.
and vernacular theory carry different degrees of prestige, speak
different languages, ask different questions, and address different
audiences, though the line between them is rapidly breaking
down. For example, when someone like Nicholas Negroponte, the
head of the MIT Media Lab, writes a regular column in Wired,
does he write as an academic or a vernacular theorist? Is his
status fundamentally different from the provocative political
journalist, John Heilman, who has also published in Wired,
but has no university affiliation? Even some of early works
of digital theory, such as Vannever Bush's influential "As
We May Think," first published in Atlantic Monthly
in 1945, appeared not in scholarly journals but in mass-market
has become central to how businesses operate, how politicians
plan their campaigns, and how consumers make choices. In many
cases, scientists and engineers are addressing humanistic concerns.
We need to make sure this remains a multi-directional exchange
with humanists speaking with greater comfort and authority about
In a period
of prolonged change, digital theory is more than an academic
exercise. Digital media impacts all aspects of western society,
from education to politics, from business to the arts. Journalists,
science-fiction writers, ideologues, entrepreneurs, activists,
classroom teachers, rock stars, judges, government regulators
are both consumers and producers of digital theory. For many,
theorizing restores predictability and stability to a world
rocked by radical change, while, for others, theory fuels change,
directing the energies unleashed by the digital revolution towards
altering the nature of political life or personal identity.
have the potential to play an active role in shaping these public
conversations about the role media plays in modern life and
framing the agenda for the next phase of technological change.
Discussions within the communications industry are shifting
from the problems of developing hardware, software and information
infrastructure to trying to figure out how those media are going
to be used and what functions they are going to play within
the lives of consumers.
we have umpteen hundred channels of cable; we have the Net and
the Web; we have the massive processing power of today's computers;
and we have cd-rom drives. How are they going to be used? What
stories, histories, lessons will they tell? How will they be
used to convey knowledge and information? How will they enhance
learning, knit communities together, preserve cultural traditions
or create new works of art which express what it means to be
human in the 21st century? In short, what is going to be their
one place where the humanists enter the conversation. We have
long traditions of thinking about storytelling, entertainment,
and teaching, about how the specific properties of a medium
shape what messages can best be conveyed. We have thought about
how to organize fields of knowledge, so that they don't get
tangled up together or pull us in too many different directions
and governmental leaders are also confronting issues of context
-- how can we make meaningful predictions about future courses
of action when shifting media technologies are reshaping core
institutions and practices before our eyes. The social sciences
might be thought of as the school of context, where issues of
culture and community, of politics and society, and the study
of how we lead our everyday lives are part of a long-standing
tradition of intellectual inquiry. If you listen closely to
statements being made by industrial leaders like Disney's Bran
Ferren or Purple Moon's Brenda
Laurel, you will find they are speaking our language.
consequence of the digital revolution has been the breaking
down of a traditional separation between the humanities and
more technical fields. In his recent book, Interface Culture,
Steve Johnson writes, "This book is extended as an attempt to
think about the object-world of technology, as though it belonged
to the world of culture, or as though these two worlds were
united. For the truth is, they have been united all along. Was
the original cave painter an artist or an engineer? She was
both, of course, like most artists and engineers since. But
a habit -- long cultivated -- of imagining them as separate,
the two great tributaries rolling steadily to the sea of modernity,
and dividing everyone in their path into two camps: those that
dwell on the shores of technology and those that dwell on the
shores of culture."  For Johnson, the
digital era will represent a new interrelationship between scientists
fusion of the humanities and engineering reflects the shifting
nature of the technologies themselves, what Bruce Sterling describes
as the change from the "steam-snorting wonders" and massive
dam projects of the early 20th century, to "technologies that
stick to the skin," and become intimate parts of everyday life.
(1996) As Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz argue, "The technological
is not so easily distinguished from the 'human,' since it is
within (medical technologies, processed foods), beside (telephones)
and outside (satellites). Sometimes we inhabit it (the climate-controlled
office space), or it inhabits us (a pacemaker). Sometimes it
seems to be an appendage or prosthetic (a pair of eyeglasses);
at other times, human-beings appear to serve as the appendages
(as in an assembly line)." 
critics often act as if their importance lay in dethroning the
scientific community's entrenched power. Yet, the best digital
theory emerges when the lines between the scientist/engineer
and humanist/artist are less clearly demarked, when engineers
integrate cultural theory into their design principles, when
humanists learn how to program, and when digital artists theorize
their own creative processes. Consider some examples:
important work on interactive fiction, for example, has come
from people like Stuart Moulthrope, Michael
Joyce, and Shelley
Jackson, who are also key hypertext authors.
Systems, not only markets such pioneering works, but also
shapes their reception context, distributing theoretical and
critical works, hosting conferences and seminars, publishing
Kinder has translated her ideas about the needs to "deconstruct"
race, sex, and gender into a computer game, Runaways.
composer Tod Makover has created and performed a musical work,
Opera, based on Marvin Minsky's Society of Mind.
Laurel works in Silicone Valley, not only theorizing the gendering
of computer technology, but also creating new games for girls
which put her ideas into practice.
Stone describes herself as a "corporate humanist," heading
a research team of psychologists, sociologists, and anthropologists,
exploring how digital media can be used to enhance or supplement
real world communities.
for corporate humanism represent alternative career opportunities
for our students who look at an increasingly bleak academic
job market, and we need to be more alert to identifying such
openings if we want to maintain the viability of the Humanities
during a phase of prolonged retrenchment in higher education.
such conversations reveal strange and unexpected common interests,
as in the discussions surrounding the development of "girl's
games," where feminist academics interested in insuring
girl's early access to the technology and female entrepreneurs
interested in broadening the software market found they might
work together.  The current state of the technology reflected
the unexamined goals of male game designers who developed product
as that reflected their own tastes and interests and, as a result,
game systems facilitated the faster reaction time necessary
for fighting games, but did not enable the memory necessary
to establish more complex character relationships.
wanted to rethink what a computer game might look like and what
kinds of pleasures it might address, and they drew on similar
intellectual perspectives to address those shared questions.
The female game executives were themselves versed in feminist
theory, often had liberal arts backgrounds and did quantitative
and qualitative research mapping girls' preferences and playing
styles. Academic feminists, who sought more precise understandings
of the gendering of game genres, sometimes found themselves
consulting with the games companies.
theorists have historically responded to static, if not moribund,
media. Printed texts existed for centuries, before there was
an academic discipline focused around the study of literature.
Film studies arose only at the moment when the Hollywood cinema's
influence, as a central cultural institution, was giving way
to television. Television studies gained academic respectability
at the moment when the dominance of network broadcasting was
challenged by new delivery technologies, such as cable or videotape.
As Marshall McLuhan has noted, "media are often put out before
they are thought out," and the lag time can be enormous.
theory is responding to the process of change, describing and
analyzing a medium (or cluster of media) still being born. But
the opportunities for humanism to play a more central role in
our culture are so great that it would be criminal to squander
is demanding leadership to help them understand and adjust to
the process of change. The institutions and practices which
we study are being transformed by the introduction of digital
technologies. Our students will be entering a job market where
a mastery of those technologies and the ability to think systematically
across media are essential to remain competitive.
question is whether our institutions will allow us the flexibility
to change with the times and whether we will define ourselves
as custodians of the past or inventors of the future, whether
we will be ready to leave behind the comforts of home and the
familiarity of Homer to venture into the unexplored, yet tantalizing,
new terrain of the holodeck.
Allucquere Rosanne Stone, The War of Desire and Technology
at the Close of the Mechanical Age (MIT Press, 1995). return
Janet H. Murray, Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative
in Cyberspace (MIT Press, 1998). return
Sven Birkerts, The Gutenberg Elegies : The Fate of Reading
in an Electronic Age (Fawcett, 1995). return
James J. O'Donnell, "The Pragmatics of The New: Trithemius,
McCluhan, Cassiodorus" in Geoffrey Nunberg (Ed.) The Future
of the Book (University of California Press, 1995). return
Miriam Formanek-Brunnel, Made to Play House: Dolls and the
Commercialization of American Girlhood, 1830-1930 (Yale
University Press, 1993). return
Steven Cooks, "Technological Revolutions and the Gutenberg Myth,"
in Mark Stefik (Ed.) Internet Dreams (MIT Press, 1996).
Jon Katz, "Media Rants: Postpolitics in the Digital Nation"
(Hotwired, 1997) return
Langdon Winner, "Who Will We Be in Cyberspace?" (The Network
Observer, 2,9, September 1995). return
Thomas McLaughlin, Street Smarts and Critical Theory: Listening
to the Vernacular (University of Wisconsin Press, 1997).
Johnson, Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms
the Way We Create and Communicate (Harper Collins, 1997).
Bruce Sterling (Ed.) Mirrorshades: A Cyberpunk Anthology
(Ace, 1987). return
Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz, "On Cultural Studies,
Science and Technology." in Stanley Aronowitz, Barbara Martinsons
and Michael Menser (Eds.) Technoscience and Cyberculture
(Routledge, 1996). return