In the New York Times Book Review this weekend there was a fascinating essay by Leon Wieseltier, 31-year veteran literary editor of the New Republic and, in one estimation, “the last of the New York intellectuals.” One pull quote reads:
there is no more urgent task for American writers than to think critically about the salience, even the tyranny, of technology.
We are, as he argues, in the middle of a digital revolution, and it is still unclear what will emerge at the end of it, but there is no doubt that the literary landscape has changed drastically since I myself entered academic life. I started at Ohio State twenty years ago with an email address longer than my left arm and no real sense that the “electronic” was permanent. I kept copies of my dissertation and early articles on floppy drives, but also in paper form, filed in file cabinets. If you were to dig around in those file cabinets even today you might find a folder entitled “email” — in the early days back at Cunz Hall I printed my email correspondence and kept it, thinking that it might disappear into the ether, words not fixed on paper ultimately leaving no physical trace.
And it might, of course. The question of archives is not less fraught in the digital age. A 1995 paper I was hoping to find and revisit has been lost in the many changes of computers and word processing programs over the years; sometimes a handout I produce for class will have random @ signs — evidence of markings of italicize here commands in Word Perfect 5.1 or some other long-obsolete program. Cyrillic in old computer files is now readable only as little boxes — letters and meaning long gone.
Paper is not eternal either, despite Mikhail Bulgakov’s brave belief that “manuscripts don’t burn,” as the devil in his novel The Master and Margarita famously argued. I sometimes console myself when I can’t sort out my electronic filing system by glancing into those file cabinets, where papers are misfiled and lack systemization just as my computer desktop and other drives do. Papers get lost; they become separated from each other and thus from their meaning; sometimes they are “helpfully” recycled by a friend or relative striving to bring order to my intellectual life. And so on.
So what of writing? My biography seminar — and this blogging project — are designed to work with technology, to encourage good habits (regular writing, fluidity, bravery and experimentation, the development of one’s own tone) and to force students to “put themselves out there,” so to speak, in the blogosphere.
At first in thinking about what Wieseltier so brilliantly calls the process of “content disappearing into ‘content’,” I wondered whether my project was misconceived, was fundamentally somehow anti-humanistic, whether I was giving into the digital like a drowning person relaxes into an oncoming ocean wave, unable to pick my head up and see what life remains to me and to literature. But further in the essay Wieseltier reminds me of an important aspect of the interface between technology and humanistic writing:
There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is a right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose. In the media, for example, the general inebriation about the multiplicity of platforms has distracted many people from the scruple that questions of quality on the new platforms should be no different from questions of quality on the old platforms. Otherwise a quantitative expansion will result in a qualitative contraction.
So as long as we don’t allow ourselves to become distracted, as long as we “regard the devices as simply new means for old ends,” we can bravely face this digital blank sheet of paper and share it with others. We can use technology not to enhance the old, necessarily, but to supplement it and perhaps replace it. We can consider the quality of our own work and that of others and strive for better — more clarity, more precision, more description and contemplation.
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