The world is witnessing an epochal transition from the codex to the computer screen as society’s main information paradigm.  Yet the true “digital revolution”, from using computers as information tools to living with them as art and as worlds unto themselves as we do with books, has yet to begin.  Before we can do so, we desperately need a new science to deal with digital issues appropriately.

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The failure of science: not wrong, but just missing the point

Grappling with the social and emotional impact of computer technology is a slippery issue that researchers simply haven’t been able to get right.  Last month, Professor Keith N. Hampton at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication released a study that suggests that the spread of digital communications via the Internet, text messaging, and so on has not increased social isolation.  According to Professor Hampton, his study was in response to a June 2006 article published in the American Sociological Review that suggested that social isolation among Internet users had actually increased, a finding more in line with common wisdom.

The problem with both Professor Hampton’s research and the ASR article is that they both focus on social isolation as a quantitatively measurable factor, whereas the real point they both miss is how digital technology makes us feel.  What is commonly termed as “social isolation” is a misnomer, a label for a feeling of great emptiness within us even after we immerse ourselves in the Internet for hours at a time.

Compare browsing the internet to its nearest analog analogue, reading a book.  Avid readers shut themselves in for hours, even days at a time to get lost within their favorite author’s pages.  Yet whether they emerge refreshed or exhausted, they come out feeling connected, full, and in a different level of being.  Even reading non-fiction like the encyclopedia or a newspaper seems to nourish us more than Wikipedia or the HuffPo do, though statistically they may have the same number of words, readers, or impact on IQ.  This truth will always elude quantitative methods.

The failure of the humanities: too many nouns, not enough verbs

Qualitative assessments of human emotions might be expected to be the domain of the humanities, but here too we have failed with respect to digital technology.  Scholars have been active studying  the immersiveness of computer-simulated virtual reality and the semiotics of hypertext versus printed books, to name but two common fields of inquiry, but they have yet to recognize the computer as an altogether separate and autochthonous kind of work itself.  Thus, they are unable to penetrate new ways of relating digital technology to our emotions and our souls because their methods and tools are still constructed for the distinct, though interrelated, experience of reading a paper codex.

By the same token, visionaries in the computer industry have largely failed to engender true innovation in the way we relate to computers, focusing almost entirely on a bifurcated track.  User interface development, broadly constructed here as the development of any kind of computer-user interaction, usually goes into making computers more like living in the real world, more like reading a book, or tweaking the experience of either.  In fact, true innovation means finding ways of living, reading, and breathing digital technology in ways still informed by books, photorealism, and everything else, but also in some way uniquely authentic to itself.

Toward a new art and a new science

The long digital revolution to come will inherently be an artistic act, a creation rather than a study of creation.  Nonetheless, scholarship must play a leading role and walk the fine line between stifling creativity and enriching it through respecting the nature of digital technology without trying to define it.

This cannot be done if we still conceive of the computer as an electromagnetic assemblage of pages and folders or of the Internet as a glorified electronic library.  While such assumptions don’t actively try to redefine, they do deny digital technology of something fundamental to itself, something that we may yet have to discover.

The way forward has precedents in the history of art and art criticism.  Consider the writings of Italian Renaissance painters who had to convince society that their craft was as elevated as poetry, then accepted as a gold standard of artistic and philosophical expression.  For modernist art, too, when we read the works of pioneering critics like Clement Greenberg we can see the scholar’s struggle to describe and work with something completely new.

The The Digital Need For a New Science by Ersin Akinci, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.