Eversion, "The Emergence of Digital Humanities," and the Oregon Trail

I have a love/hate relationship with computers and the internet, it would be fair to say. When I was in elementary school back in the Eighties (leg warmers and Mr. T's gold chains, oh my!), we got our first computer lab which, of course, was supposed to be an educational "tool." It helped that there was no such thing as the "Internet" or "world wide web," or if there was then it wasn't connected to our bulky, size-of-a-small-country PCs. My distinct memory of the computer lab was the time spent playing educational games, like the Oregon Trail. My lack of success at this "pioneers against the elements" game (my family was usually racked by measles and Indian attacks before we got too far into the wilds of Nebraska) might have colored my view of the brave new world promoted by cyber-technology in the ensuing decades.

The Emergence of Digital Humanities suggests that I was right to be skeptical of any such claims made by early proponents of the Internet, because the "other world" of cyberspace is, as it turns out, all around us now, and the greatest science fiction writers couldn't envision that the "virtual reality" we were sold on as being "the next big thing" would suffer the same fate as Pokemon cards, Cosby sweaters, and the stand-up career of Andrew Dice Clay. Virtual reality, while fuel for some of the more paranoid fantasies of sci-fi writers since the coining of the term "cyberspace" in the Eighties, has been the proverbial gold-town-gone-bust, but it hasn't been all for naught. The world we have today, of smartphones and cell phone reception in even the remotest of the corners of the earth, means that the computer, into which we would once be relegated, is not laid open for us to dip into at will (or, in some cases, all the time).

Eversion is the term for this phenomenon, and it is the main thrust of Professor Jones' book, that everything around us is fodder for the digital humanities. This can be simple encryption of written books onto the internet or the technological advance of having action figures that, through a code, can be dropped into a virtual reality (in this case, a video game) and "played" with onscreen.

I have to wonder if I'm the ideal student for digital humanities, at this juncture: while I am no Luddite, I have reservations about the connected world we live in and the excess to which some go to maintain a profile online (I'm thinking of all those celebrities who get reality shows out of a sex tape, not naming any names). The implication seems to be, if you're not online you might as well be a non-entity. It's a notion that I have trouble with. I have a Facebook account but not a Twitter or Instagram account (or whatever is the hip, young "with it" site this week). I have a flip phone, and while I concede that at some point I will have to get a "smartphone," it isn't because I'll eventually fold so much as the store I go to will no longer stock flip phones at some point. I feel a bit like the grumpy old man that Jones seems to suggest Roland Barthes would be if he were still around, talking about all "these damn kids on their cellphones and with their Tweets and such." It's obviously not a position to take in a class about the concept of using tools like the Internet to make an object of study more accessible.

To get back to the reading, I thought it interesting that Jones brought up the anti-digital or "back to analog" movement, which seems focused on reclaiming for non-computer items of the past the relevance they had once upon a time (say, in the Eighties, while I was getting slaughtered along the Oregon Trail). I haven't bought into the notion that "vinyl is better" (a hipster credo that has gained traction, ironically enough, on Facebook and other social media sites that wouldn't have existed without the computer). I remember how much "fun" it was to place a record on a record player and try to cue up the needle just right (and the inevitable scratching one encountered no matter how carefully one placed that needle). There might be something "pure" in other people's minds (or in their ears) about the hiss of a vinyl record, but I'm not buying it. CDs, and later on iTunes and other music service sites, have been part of my existence since I bought my first CD (R.E.M.'s Out of Time) and had to borrow a relative's clunky portable CD player in order to listen to it. Vinyl is just a hassle, and it seems of  a kind with the warped futurism of the movie Brazil (set in a dystopian future where people have all kinds of wiring obviously showing in their homes, computers are removed from their shells so that the contents and wiring are exposed, and people literally drown in paperwork that a fully automated society wouldn't even think of).

Everytime I walk down the street, I see people with their phones out, checking their status or the statuses of their friends, or playing games (there's a recent Esurance commerical with a grandmotherly woman telling her young grandson how much she enjoys "Candy Crush," she is literally crushing candies with a hammer at the kitchen table). It's not going away anytime soon, and progress can be a good thing, for sure. I know for certain that I've benefited from the more social nature of the post-Nineties internet, the availability of like-minded people online to talk to about various things or issues (or just to talk about nothing at all, just so I feel the connection), and I will not be taking myself "off the grid" anytime soon. But I wonder if all this connectivity, all this liking of one another's statuses, all this illusionary sense of community online that Jones argues is translatable to the real world, if it's all really as good as it has been touted to be. Everytime Apple comes out with a new iPhone, my inner cynic reacts with the notion that the ghost of Steve Jobs won't rest until I buy into the hype and jump on the iPhone bandwagon. The study of digital humanities, and the practice itself, should raise questions about not just the good side of it but also the potential bad side. Because otherwise, we're just all on the Oregon Trail, a few kilometers from either surviving the combination smallpox-outbreak-and-Comanche-attack or not.