Thou art more lovely and more digital
When I was first approached by Dr. Sara Humphreys to participate in the Digital Communitas project, we began our research the way anyone does: with a wide scope and a lot of questions. Since moving on from Trent, to Toronto, and away from my undergraduate humanities discipline, the pedagogical interrogation that this project inspired in me in 2012 has not left.
As we engage with more and more intellectual (and not so intellectual) dialogues about what it means to participate in the post-secondary communities and structures at a time when we are slowly and quickly acknowledging our digital realities, the biggest conversation seems to be a very fear-laced one.
You know what i’m talking about. The professor that starts a doomed petition to ban laptops in class because they will most certainly impede learning. they teach english literature, or classics, or any discipline that was once taught one way for a very long time and now, like the seasons, is tugging at our heels to change.
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may, or whatever.
They’ve written piles of books, called offensive things like ‘The Dumbest Generation’, have published youth-shaming op-ed pieces in the national post under the nom de plume ‘Margaret Wente.’ Anyone under 30 is just a big technology obsessed entitled brat that can work an iPod, iPad, iMac, &iRobot simultaneously, but doesn’t respect hard work, doesn’t or how it used to be, walking uphill both ways, gathering kindling in the woods like a knowledgeable boy scout.
I live in Toronto now, which is a world away from my undergrad in English literature, and peterborough, and 2010. it’s 2014, and the world hasn’t ended. It’s changed and grown, and funny that we didn’t see that coming.
When asking me if i’d write another instalment of essays for DC, I was delighted but admittedly daunted by the task. There is SO much to examine about our present hyperrealities, and how philosophy has explained a lot of fascinating truths about what can be made from these digital landscapes.
I want to address a social justice interrogation of the 20 century pedagogical model in a 21st century context, using disability & disability culture as an entry point. I will discuss tools, both product based but mores frameworks and shifts in understanding & representing what this new landscape of digital humanities implicates.
I want to start by saying that i wouldn’t have existed twenty years ago. not in the same way as i do now. I won’t get into the gritty details of my biography, because you can find what you need on my blog, and from google.
And I don’t say that for myself. I say that because I am the narrative prosthesis I studied in literature. any attempt to be a public figure and be visibly disabled is a joining of a fictional legacy of fools, gargoyles, ogres, mystics, urchins, wizards, succubi, witches, trolls, gremlins, and any and every untold underling under the sun (and in the shadows). The presence of my body on any stage is already a metaphor, even if there is no ramp onto said stage. Especially if there is no ramp.
The 20th century was a century of truth and reconciliation in Canada. The decolonial project is not complete, but defined, and now it has manifestos. they occupy streets, hearts, minds and blogstreams, because the platform has changed. It is digital and the ramp always already present, even if invisible.
If we are going to take up the responsibility, as scholars, to deeply respond to contemporary literature and the culture it documents & reacts to, it might be helpful to be more politically rigorous that our increasingly neoliberal institutions prefers we be.
Like Sonnet 18, often mis-contextualized as a romantic poem, it is in our best interested to remain living and communing while we are alive, and it is in our truth as humans that we are interconnected. No experience is separate from another. The ongoing erasure of disabled narrators from the canon does not speak to their irrelevance, but our own undisturbed power structures. Similarly to our disenfranchising of ‘the youth of today’ as a mechanism for fear of digital planet.
If we would like to evolve our beloved academic halls of learning to reflect and embrace marginalized realities, we have to be prepared to face the truths that the canon keeps intact, dismantle the notion of high brow, and wrestle this prestige away from dead white men. and as we do this work, I firmly believe we will begin to write about the Internet as the age of an equalizer, not unlike a figurative plague or famine. A reality that says: if you don’t like this blog post, you can kiss my #pulpit, baby.
And it is precisely youth-toted arrogance, this outrage toward marginalization, this multi-social wave of literacy that is going to deliver the humanities into a cultural flux that is both harsh and exciting.
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