A random thought popped into my head after class yesterday, and I'm posting it here because I wonder if it can come across effectively on the class' Facebook page (and also I'm a bit afraid that it may be ridiculous once I type it up and look at it, so I figured it was safe here): what if digital humanites is like hip-hop/rap once was, at least in the early days of the genre?
Consider: when rap came into being in the late Seventies, it was a process of using established tools for listening to music (turn-tables, records, etc.) and turning them into music-making devices. A lot of this was due to chronic neglect in the inner-city, where buying instruments traditionally associated with music-making might be out of the question, and also a reaction against the fact that rock and roll (once a melding of black blues and white country) was now pretty much a whites-only genre, due to the prevalence of white rock stars (Hendrix was more the exception to the rule in 1967, after Chuck Berry and other black artists associated with rock either fell on hard times, died, or were just neglected by the record-buying public). Similarly, it could be said that the early practitioners of DH were using computers not for the process that the public might have imagined in terms of total immersion in "cyberspace," but to connect more to the world than to escape it, subverting the natural expectations that "the internet is apart from the world" in much the same way that hip-hop took the record-player turn-table and subverted expectations by scratching the records, creating new beats for rappers then to overlay their own work.
Bit of a tortured analogy, I know, but there was a mention of rap in the class last night, and it set me off on this path of intellectual wondering about whether, by virtue of its youth and relative new-ness on the scene, DH might be comparable in some ways to hip-hop pre-"Walk This Way" (the Aerosmith/Run DMC collaberation that is cited as the crossover moment for rap and hip-hop into the mainstream). The debates about what DH is and isn't, how inclusive/exclusive it should be, are issues that in some ways are reflected in the notion that rap has become omnipresent as the dominant medium for music, yet there are many who use rap who aren't rap (I doubt Katy Perry has tons of street cred).
Rap has benefited immensely from the advances of technology, with sampling and digital recording being but two of the more obvious examples of this. Humanities purists might sound like the same people who dismissed rap as "crap" because they either don't understand it or fear its impact. A progressive force meets a conservative object and chaos tends to ensue. In much the same ways that technology is chided by some as leading to a "coarsening" of our culture, rap was from its inception attacked for various reasons, but mostly because it upset the natural idea that musicians had to play instruments (but turn-tables *were* instruments).
Like I said, this might be total crap on my part so I figured it was safe here, for Dr. Morey's eyes only.
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