Ian Bogost, “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt”
“Not for the easily offended,” cautioned the tweet linking to “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt,” Ian Bogost’s essay for Debates in the Digital Humanities. I considered the source of the tweet: DC area, government-employed. You can make a career out of risk avoidance in a place like that.
When someone in DC flags something as potentially offensive to the delicate psyches of their Twitter followers, it’s probably because it deviates from whatever the usual echo chamber is saying and they’re not sure how people will receive it. In other words, it’s almost certainly worth reading.
Speaking of delicate psyches. Enter the digital humanities, a term embraced by librarians because it makes them seem like they’re suddenly embracing the tech-immersed new world. We’ll set aside the fact that many of them still believe Second Life is a legitimate medium for reaching out via the Internet. Bogost’s essay surely isn’t the first to criticize this crowd (though he doesn’t name libraries specifically), but it’s one of the first I’ve seen in a published format that can’t be easily ignored by its targeted audience.
I believe the efforts of modern libraries to be honest and well-intentioned in regard to embracing the Internet and exploring what digital resources can and should be. It’s not for lack of effort. Their problem is something really fundamental, which Bogost phrases eloquently in his essay.
We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the second coming of the nineteenth century while simultaneously dismissing out of our sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family, craft, science.
Humanists work hard but at all the wrong things, the commonest of which is the fetid fester of a hypothetical socialist dream world, one that has become far more disconnected with labor and material than the neoliberalism it claims to replace.
It’s a type of ivory tower problem. I know plenty of individuals who work as librarians and would independently buck this theme, but the fact is that the larger institutions have not changed, and as long as they’re run by committee, they probably won’t.
Of course this is potentially offensive. Bogost is basically calling them disconnected elitists. “We are not central because we have chosen to be marginal,” he writes, adding nuance to his diagnosis.
The digital world is replete. It resists any efforts to be colonized by the postcolonialists. We cannot escape it by holing up in Berkeley waiting for the taurus of time to roll around to 1968. It will find us and it will videotape our kittens.
It’s not the digital that marks the future of the humanities—it’s what things digital point to: a great outdoors.
The exact opposite of this wild “outdoors” of the Internet would be the cloistered, curated collections of archives and libraries. It’s not even entirely about the collections, though — it’s the hierarchy of decision-making and management running them. Digital relevancy is less about having a Twitter feed and more about focusing on things external to the library’s original mission statement. Opening up a Facebook page for a library is not the same thing as engaging with its patrons in a new language. (All it really does is befriend other libraries’ Facebook pages, anyway.)
I don’t think Bogost is saying the “solution” to this issue is to crowdsource the old job of collection management. It’s more of a challenge to the people running things: what do you consider your main achievements when you’re running a library or an archive today? Why does your job exist, and why should it continue to exist?
Bogost’s essay concludes with a call to “burn away the dead wood,” which should make any librarian or archivist nervous. I think this has less to do with anyone’s job description, though, than it does with their attitude that libraries are entitled to a certain degree of unquestioned respect in today’s society.
The value of a library should be self-evident in an educated society, but somehow we’ve arrived at a point where it isn’t really that obvious, and it’s not fair to blame the public for being too dense or too busy to know any better. Bogost turns the camera back to us to ask if maybe we’re just a little egotistical — maybe an impossible question to fully answer, but an important one to consider.
