Moving Matters in the digital age
Last month, in the context of the Moving Matters Traveling Workshop organized at the University of California, Riverside, I presented some thoughts on the nature of movement and migration in the digital age. When I think of movement, I often think of bodies moving — and when I think of how the digital has affected this, I usually think of how technology has made movement easier and faster, or unnecessary. Technological improvements allows us to fly across the Atlantic, rather than sail it, and technology has made it easy for us to communicate across long distances without having to factor cost or time. Letters do not have to be transported by mail — they are bits of information hurling across fiber optic lines and satellites so that my mother can give me the correct instructions for a rhubarb crumble while rhubarb is still in season.
Digital movement and data migration is about more than speed and efficiency. It is also about reach, and privacy, and power. It is about people being connected via digital networks, and about entire constituencies staying outside of those network. It is about governments spying on their citizens, and new definitions of patriotism and treason — just ask Edward Snowden, Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning. It is superficial (see Snapchat and Instagram) and profound (again — Snapchat and Instagram). And like every other technology, it has the power to change the world by making everyone witness what happens in Ferguson, Tahrir Square and more recently, Trump rallies. And it is just as likely to be abused by bullies, trolls, and every other kind of coward.
I am observing this shift from my perch as an historian. It is with exhilaration that I see the production of a volume of evidence unequaled in history. Never have so many humans contributed to the written record, and done so largely publicly. Historians mostly study written texts, and we have never been able to look forward to quite this much material. Twitter’s limit of 140 characters has done nothing to minimize the abundance of text it generates. When I say “it”, I mean the 300+ million active twitter accounts (see here). Facebook, wordpress blogs, youtube, webzines, and platforms like Medium provide more voluntarily shared insight into — well — anything humans want to share, than at any other time.
“We are on the cusp of something exhilarating and terrifying” — David Bowie, 1999, on the internet. BBC interview with Jeremy Paxman
Like Bowie (I love being able to say that), I think this transformation that is both exhilarating and terrifying. The terrifying part is that we are just starting to figure our how to archive all these digital texts. Where are the last 20 years of digital production? I cannot remember my aol email address — but I am sure there’s detritus from that account somewhere. 20 years ago we already had email addresses, but there was not Twitter, Facebook or Yelp. Today, digitally born data is generated every minute on highly permeable systems. 100 years ago, a letter-writer could trust that after sealing an envelope, it would not be opened until it arrived in the hands of its intended recipient. Surely there were many lost letters, and letters that were opened by the wrong person, but the medium by which letters moved did not involve multiple layers of encryption to protect it from prying eyes. Today — all communication is vulnerable to hacking, privacy is big business (and it is also an illusion), and moreover — it is largely happening on and moving through private platforms. So who owns my emails? Who else has copies of what I send? Where are the back up servers to my bank account, medical records, cell phone calls, text messages, Facebook updates, Instagram feeds, snapchat images, tumbler images, yelp reviews, twitter retweets, DMV payments, Netflix usage, Uber rentals, flight e-tickets, AirBnB stays and Blue Apron meals? How will we build the archive to hold all these mundane interactions that constitute the record of our lives? Rare is the paper diary, I haven’t seen a telephone book in years, let alone census data or tax records or even employment data. All the sources that historians are trained to analyze are on a platform that the archivists of the better part of the 20th century, let alone any preceding century, would be hard pressed to recognize. So where will a historian in 50 years do her research about the turn of the 21st century? How will a historian of science, labor, gender or the economy in 2070 analyze the 2016 US presidential elections?
This leads me to my last, but not least, point. If we as humanists don’t learn the language in which we are encoding the data humans are producing — we will not have anything to study. We will study the few texts that remain in physical form, and we will study the texts that people trained to do so have reconstituted for us — but instead of trying to deal with how to sample from an enormous corpus of digital evidence, we will be working with a curated sample of evidence, with little or no access to the logic of the text’s creation, origin or context.
In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.”― Ethan Zuckerman, Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection
The topic of the conference — Moving Matters — was deeply tied to migration, and the movement of people across territories and cultures. There are projected futures in which physical movement will become unnecessary, but I think this version of the future is still a bit far off. But a future in which humans move both physically and digitally — that is here. The current refugee crisis is physical, the plight of thousand of people is definitively material, but their stories are being told digitally, and their future very often depends in a smartphone that connects them home, but also provides them with information. Locked away in enormous refugee shelters and camps or in foreign countries, smartphones are the bridge that helps refugees overcome language barriers, isolation and “information precarity”, as this article in the Washington Post illustrates.
I do not want a future in which historians, or any humanists, cannot explore the digital traces that humans are generating, in which we doom ourselves to self-imposed information precarity. I do not want to see my profession refuse to learn a new language, balk at collaborating with data and information scientists, question the value of this information or consider “traditional text” a higher order of evidence. We must train students to do this, and we must consider our fields of study with this in mind.
In short, the humanist of the future will be digital, or she will not be. The archive of the future will also be digital, and will curate the digital, or it will not be. And movement, of data and of people — will be digital too.
