Literally

Yesterday's blog has taken off and is getting lots of comment all over the blogosphere.  It was called "Why Is the Information Age Without the Humanities Like the Industrial Revolution Without the Steam Engine?"   This is one of those blogs that takes off and has wings of its own and I'm interested in how it is being interpreted.  It is loose and deliberatively provocative, but I am being literal  in the analogy--and also the opposite of literal in its provocation.  It is also a homage to Tim Berners-Lee's original conceptualization of the World Wide Web and is not intended as a commentary on all the Web's subsequent iterations.

Here's the literal part of the analogy:  Without the steam engine, one would not have had the Industrial Revolution that changed (not all, but many of) the relationships of labor, including between producers and consumers.  I am saying that without a different humanistic conception of the machine (i.e. computation) we would not have the World Wide Web that changed (not all, but many of) the relationships of labor, including between producers and consumers. 

I am also saying (but I can't say too much about this because it is embargo'd until my book comes out) that we developed a mechanistic, linear, causal, assembly-line measurement-based way of understanding the operations of labor for the Industrial Age and those methods have characterized much of the 19th and 20th centuries.   We need a far more integrated, interdisciplinary process-oriented, iterative, interactive, qualitative and quantitatively driven, multi-factor, associational, and emphatically humanistic way of evaluating and measuring the Information Age.

What a coincidence!  That's why we created first ISIS at Duke in 1999 and then HASTAC in 2002.   Special shout out and thanks, now, to all those who have been part of this adventure.

Here's the URL for yesterday's post:  http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/information-age-without-human...