“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the
beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think
through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new
technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more
complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based
disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a
rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based
counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief
that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she
calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital
work within print traditions and vice versa. Hayles examines the
evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the
digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research,
teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological
consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning,
or “hyper reading,” and analysis through machine algorithms are
forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends
that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the
limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating
what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the
technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects
of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our
changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age,
illustrating this through three innovative digital productions—Steve
Tomasula’s electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark
Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. Deepening our
understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital
technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think
presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the
humanities today.
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Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780226321370
Publisert
2016
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
University of Chicago Press
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter