By Robie Liscomb
Questions of the relationship between information technology and the humanities were explored Oct. 31 during the second colloquium in the series "Memory, Communication and Value: Considering the Humanities," sponsored by the Vice-President Academic and Provost and the Humanities Centre. Participants in the panel discussion were Drs. John Lutz (History), Wolf-Michael Roth (Education), Elizabeth Grove-White (English) and Randall Jones, Professor of German and former Dean of Humanities at Brigham Young University.
Lutz stressed that the humanities have not yet harnessed the full capabilities of new information technology. "The humanities fetishize print materials," he said. "We should embrace technologies beyond the book. No one should graduate in the humanities without the ability to analyze print, film, and video artifacts."
The humanities have had an anti-technological bias, but technology and human values do not necessarily clash, Lutz claimed. He described technologies as not neutral, however, but as having politics and values embedded in them. He urged that humanists, as scholars trained in critical analysis, should help guide technology.
Roth analyzed the introduction of a new technology into a community, describing the effects of providing glue guns to a fourth-grade science class building architectural models. He traced the rapid development of a culture of glue gun users, illustrating how the power of a technology depends upon its social and cultural context. He stressed the complexity of interactions that determine whether a new technology becomes successful, and that "the technology's trajectory cannot be predicted by any set of its social conditions." Roth urged that people become "socio-techno-sophs" rather than technophobes; that they appreciate the interconnectedness of technology and society and learn to use technology rather than be used by it.
Grove-White took a historical view of information technologies, remarking that they both shape and are shaped by social structures. She said that over the past 2,000 years we've seen a succession of information technologies, and that the transition from oral to print culture, for example, is still being worked out as our notions of text, reading and writing change. She cautioned that the history of new information technologies is linked very closely to that of knowledge centres such as the monastery and the university. She related having walked among the ruins of a thousand-year-old bardic school in Ireland the previous week and stressed the point that knowledge centres can and do fall into disuse. Grove-White argued that hypermedia&emdash;which includes text, sound and visual images, is nonsequential, collaborative, interactive and not fixed&emdash;represents a new and very powerful information technology that challenges the limitations of critical analysis developed for dealing with texts alone. She also raised the possibility that the distributive power of new information technologies may lead to the end of the university as a physical location.
Jones reiterated the view that the challenge of new technology is to use it meaningfully in one's work rather than be used by it, and he raised the question of how to understand the vastly expanded amount of information made available by computer networks.