Chapter Briefs
Chapter 1: Mostly an outline of the book, but introduces Key concepts.
Chapter 2: Discusses the history of the digital humanities and its relationship with the print humanities.
Chapter 3: Begins to provide detailed information on technogenesis, while also dissecting close, hyper-, and machine reading practices.
Chapter 4: Provides an analysis of TOC, a digital novel, in order to show how machines and humans have complex temporalities.
As the picture above illustrates: we are in a time of shifting. The book on the keyboard is juxtaposed by its multimodal, review counterpart; all the while, hidden at the top of the computer screen, human (me) interaction is caught somewhere in-between. Traditional print texts now have to share the stage with digital texts. What this sharing implicates changes from field to field, scholar to scholar. Hayles mainly advocates for a combination of both print practices and digital practices to remain intact, without one being privileged over the other. In doing this, her book gets divided into three major sections. Chapters 1-3 are primarily concerned with ecology and pedagogy, and with a little bit of overlap, chapters 3-5 illustrate technogenesis. Chapters 6-8 on the other hand take a sharp turn into the digital humanities, focusing on databases.
If this feels like too much, it is because it is too much. Hayles' book has broad interests, and to the reader, it feels like she crammed every interest into this text, including some metaphors based from a pottery class she was/is enrolled in. Therefore, it is easy to get lost in this text, which Hayles or the editorial team knew since not only does chapter 1 outline the text, but each chapter spends a good deal of space retelling what the last chapter has said and what the next chapters will say, and as if that wasn't enough signposting, there are also interludes between chapters that spend time talking about what the previous chapters have said and what the future chapters will say. And even given all of this summarizing, questions still arise in the text, evidenced by the beginning of chapter 7 where Hayles writes, "As chapter 5 argues, database is unlikely to displace narrative as a human way of knowing" (199). Although she claims that chapter 5 (mostly about telegraphs and coding) made arguments about databases, chapter 6 was clearly the first database chapter, which is illustrated in chapter 8 when she writes, "As we saw in chapter 6, databases emphasize spatial displays, whereas narrative embodies complex temporalities" (221). In other words, this book is hard to keep straight. However, following the three divisions I mentioned above, a pattern and sense of linearity emerges.
Part of the confusion of her text emerges from her overall rhetorical strategy. Since she wants to show that both print humanities and digital humanities can coexist, she has to describe the current scene of both studies, she has to advocate for solution for them to coexist, she has to provide the theory to support this (technogenesis), and finally, she has to illustrate how this would look. For the most part, she successful does this.
The first step in accomplishing this task happens throughout the whole book, but most dominantly in the first three chapters where she describes the ecology of both print and digital humanities. Nothing necessarily revolutionary comes from this process of describing; however, her solution is a compelling argument:
Needed are approaches that can locate digital work within print traditions, and print traditions within digital medium, without obscuring or failing to account for the differences between them. One such approach is advocated here: it goes by the name of Comparative Media Studies (7).Comparative Media Studies, as she advocates it is a place where the two studies can find a way to connect and feed off of one another. This kicks off what educators and humanity scholars may find the most interesting part of her book because "on a pedagogical level Comparative Media Studies implies course designs that strive to break the transparency of print and denaturalize it by comparing it with other media forms" (Hayles 8). Essentially, Hayles envisions not only a change in practice, but a change in the classroom as well. In exploring the divide of the print and digital humanities, chapter 2 provides the history of the digital humanities, pointing to clear tensions between print humanity practices and digital humanity practices. Mainly, digital humanities work in creation of databases that print humanities use, but feel that it is not their job (Hayles 50). According to Hayles, the problem rests in the fact that there is not enough collaboration between digital and print scholars.
Thus far into the text, Hayles has made little contribution and has instead performed more a review of the literature function, setting the scene for chapter 3 where the real meat of the book begins. This is where Hayles begins to dissect the practices of humanity scholars, identifying three forms of reading: close, hyper, and machine (55). Her argument boils down to all three practices producing, useful but different results. I found myself particularly impressed by how she looked at data collected using brain scans; although many would have found themselves enslaved by scientific results, Hayles dissected the data to reach meaningful discussion. Consider the following passage:
The chain of assumptions that led Small, for example, to conclude that brain function changed as a result of Google searches can go wrong in several different ways... First, researchers assume that the correlation between activity in a given brain area is caused by a particular stimulus; however, most areas of the brain respond similarly to several different kinds of stimuli, so another stimulus could be activating the change rather than the targeted one (67).
In other words, Hayles shows that she knows data does not rule the scholarly scope. Instead, analysis, interpretation and narrative will always be necessary.
The next two chapters, 4 and 5, function to explain and illustrate Technogenesis, which is merely "the idea that humans and technics have coevolved together" (Hayles 10). Skeptical at first, given that human evolution is a series of genetic adaptations that lead to stronger survival in their environment, I had never really bought into the idea that our brains are truly becoming hardwired to the digital age, since we do not pass on what we acquire in life. However, as Hayles explains, "Neurologists have known for some time that an infant, at birth, has more synapses (connections between neurons) than she or he will ever have again in life" (99). This means that humans are born with the ability to adapt their brains to their environment; in other words, brains adapted to work technology function different than brains that are adapted to read novels. This is a compelling argument, and the reader will find it extremely interesting and relevant to many fields of study.
Unfortunately, her analysis of TOC, a digital novel does not hold its own weight against the theories of complex temporalities that Hayles later discusses in chapter 4. The novel is visual, and although Hayles incorporates graphics to supplement her explanations, the reader is left having to take her word for it, not really being able to fully grasp her arguments. The following chapter, on the other hand, is also interesting. Her discussion of the telegraph and code books, predating computer code, convinces the reader that technogenesis is a real thing, especially the use of graphics on page 129, where she reveals the dramatic differences in how much practice in code receiving had on faster code receiving times. However, after 10 pages, the fifty page chapter starts to feel like a history of telegraphs, which is not necessary in advancing her arguments. As a matter of fact, her fifth chapter is longer than chapters 7 and 8 put together, making the reader wonder as to why so much time needed to be devoted to telegraph coding.
As mentioned before, the last three chapters of How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis deals with databases. Whereas Hayles' argument that narrative will not go away in a database centric digital age is an important one, without some familiarity with databases, the reader may feel lost. Moreover, I found chapter 6 more important than the last two chapters because that was the chapter that she took the hard stance: "narrative is essential to the human lifeworld" (181). This is a necessary claim in a world that she points out is questioning the relevance of narrative. The rest of chapter 6 discusses spatial history and the transition that history scholars are seeing in their field, which feels out of place, considering the remaining discussion in chapters 7 and 8 are largely devoted to an analysis of Only Revolutions and The Raw Shark Texts. While Hayles may be connecting this all together using spatial reasoning or other means, the signposting in these last chapters make it hard to follow.
The last paragraph of chapter 8 acted as her conclusion, which was a little surprising considering the book that spent so much time trying to tie things together gave the reader such a short cool down period. Ultimately, I would have liked to have seen a better discussion of how chapters 6, 7, and 8 connected to the rest of the book.
Chapter Briefs
Chapter 5: Provides the evidence for technogenesis through a history of telegraph and telegraph coding.
Chapter 6: Begins the discussion on databases and spatial reasoning; also discusses the importance of narrative.
Chapter 7: Continues the database thread and discusses The Raw Shark Texts.
Chapter 8: Finishes the database thread and discusses Only Revolutions.