“Along with many other scholars, we suggest that the migration of cultural materials into digital media is a process analogous to the flowering of Renaissance and post-Renaissance print culture.”

Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 1-26.

This quotation is both obvious and worth taking a moment to reflect on. Burdick et al are not the originators of such an observation, and many of us are not new to the idea that we are living in a unique time full of potential. However, the technology is so often centered as the change, and its effects on culture are still in the process of being understood. I grew up thinking about the Renaissance as a cultural movement, and then understood this shift as having been set into motion by technology, the printing press. In the future, we will likely be able to speak more about the cultural shifts catalyzed by digital technology. Discussions are already underway: theories about shorter attention spans, fragmented and overwhelmed states of being, democratization of access, extremism through computer algorithms, the effects of blue light, and more time sitting in chairs. Many of these are not necessarily ‘flowerings’ but seem more troubling. The main similarity, which may rise above all this noise is simply increased accessibility, going even further than print-culture’s reach.

This makes me muse about drawing comparisons between the relationships between people and technology then (in the Renaissance in Europe) and now. Most people did not know how to use a printing press, but many people used flipped through the pages of books, in this sense using technology. Nowadays, there are many types of technology use: the skeletal layer being coding, and on top of that the layer that most people engage with regularly: creating and uploading videos and photos with captions, and blogging (like what I’m doing now), for example. People are interacting closely with technologies of creation in myriad ways, in addition to reading and interpreting information. Certainly, one of the most intriguing ideas for me here is how this notion of ‘putting something out there’ onto the internet as an ordinary practice is enacting cultural change, and even whether such assumptions about the increase in a particular kind of creativity are even valid.