In the Digital Age, the Humanities Can Afford to Go On the Offensive

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http://www.livescience.com/44218-in-the-digital-age-the-humanities-can-afford-to-go-on-the-offensive.html

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Yeah that’s right: English major with philosophy. Deal with it.

Humans, as a species, are around 200,000 years old. Compared to the age of the universe we’re clearly infants but compared to the internet, we’re pretty old and compared to social media, which is still in its infancy, we’re positively ancient.

We’re definitely quite experienced when it comes to human interactions, expressions and relations and have even come up with a field of study to describe, analyse and account for this experience in the form of the humanities. In the information age, humanities is turning into a whole new beast. It’s time to stop defending the field as though it needs our help and show the world that it really can’t live without us.

The box is open

Humanities is the study of the human condition and the way we interact with nature, technology, health, art, politics, religion, money and mystery. The internet is, in effect, the greatest cultural treasure chest ever created and is allowing us to expand our horizons like never before. It’s a constantly updated repository of the very human interactions and expressions we have always sought to explore in the humanities and, for better or worse, they are all stored on file. We can rifle through them using search engines, network analyzers and crowd opinion aggregators.

Leopold von Ranke, a German historian and the pioneer of modern source-based history, could not have asked for better conditions for conducting studies on the human condition. But von Ranke, who sought objectivity in historiography, would probably also be apprehensive about the ease with which information can be obtained these days. Not all information is good information. It can, if not properly acquired, formatted, handled and administered, derail reason and rationality and even threaten democracy.