As I type away on my keyboard, I feel
pretty confident most of us are aware of the effects and affects that various
technologies and technological advances have had on our lives; moving from pen
to keyboard (Katherine N. Hayles qtd. in Bassett 116), from book to
PDF, from newspaper to Facebook news feed, etc. In the short amount of time I’ve experienced
this world, it has been concatenated by technological progressions, and my days have been
defined by their developments. Hayles argues that the capacities of a simple
word processor have radically changed academic research, while other
technologies like blogging have created tensions that have yet to
be negotiated within institutional practices (e.g., should an academically
informal blog with a larger readership be considered above a peer-reviewed
article with low or no citation rates?) (“How We Think” 2-5). It affects my
studies, allowing me to access databases’ worth of articles without having to
take one step, never mind quite a few toward the library and through its
shelves. It allows me to watch Netflix on one screen while I search for sources
in another.
For Matthew Wilkens, digital practices
introduce new advantages to literary studies by allowing easy (i.e.,
computational) data mining, such as the quantitative visualization which plots
the geographical places that are mentioned in American novels published between
1851-1875 (“Canons” n. pag, Fig. 14.2). It allows for the interesting proposal of
a “revised understanding of American regionalism” (n. pag), although Wilkens
rightly admits its hypothetical nature, and the need for further investigation.
For Matthew Fuller, our culture’s reliance on digital media necessitates
“software studies,” which Bassett summarizes as “an approach capable of
exploring digital operations, structures, languages, and their intersections
and connections directly” (118). Fuller’s Software
Studies/A Lexicon provides a primer, advocating on the most basic level
that “[s]oftware structures and makes possible much of the contemporary world.
[Software Studies/A Lexicon] proposes
an exercise in the prototyping of transversal and critical approaches to such
stuff […] and to show […] the conditions of possibility that software
establishes” (1-2). I don’t think it was until this morning, when I found an
archived post from Vice’s Motherboard
that I realized just how important these kinds of analyses could be.
The stakes of “software studies” literacy are quite high; according to software engineer Brett Thomas, not knowing how to navigate the internet, and not knowing the ramifications of traveling through cyberspace, can result in your porn-viewing habits being released, legally but without your consent. The reason? Because we don’t really understand digital navigation – we can type in an address, but we don’t know and/or fully get what happens when we type that address and press enter. It’s complicated and to be honest, if I were to try to explain it I’d probably muck it all up, but there’s a great comprehensivearticle about it by Panopticlick. Basically, websites request information from your browser, which freely gives information about you, like your IP address. Even if a porn website promises under its terms and conditions that it does not collect your data, third parties install tracking elements that do (they can range from Google to targeted advertisers).
The stakes of “software studies” literacy are quite high; according to software engineer Brett Thomas, not knowing how to navigate the internet, and not knowing the ramifications of traveling through cyberspace, can result in your porn-viewing habits being released, legally but without your consent. The reason? Because we don’t really understand digital navigation – we can type in an address, but we don’t know and/or fully get what happens when we type that address and press enter. It’s complicated and to be honest, if I were to try to explain it I’d probably muck it all up, but there’s a great comprehensivearticle about it by Panopticlick. Basically, websites request information from your browser, which freely gives information about you, like your IP address. Even if a porn website promises under its terms and conditions that it does not collect your data, third parties install tracking elements that do (they can range from Google to targeted advertisers).
Understanding how IP addresses work (or how
to get one to look like it’s working somewhere else via VPN) becomes important.
But so does, apparently, understanding that “incognito mode” is geared toward
our reliance on interface-based digital interactions, and that the
Incognito-user’s data is still read and written somewhere, just not within your
cache of autofills and hyperlink histories. Knowledge of digital processes
then, is as important as how we use digital media. In fact, when Brian Merchant
reports for Motherboard, he repeats
no less than three times that “incognito modes” in a browser does nothing to
stop data tracking (this does not account for the two mentions of “private
browsing modes”). His story attempts to prime readers in rudimentary software
studies literacy, re-assessing how our culture uses digital media, and
explaining that digital media is often used for different but no less important
ways.
Literary studies might focus on what porn
means, or how porn affects culture, or how culture affects porn, etc. Consider The Feminist Porn Book: The Politics of
Producing Pleasure (2013); a cursory glance of the table of contents
addresses neither web-design nor code, although it focuses on race, gender,
queer studies, fat studies, sex education, topics familiar to literary and
cultural studies students. Yet vast quantities of porn are available online:
according to the Wall Street Journal, 70% of 18-34 year olds have visited a
pornographic website within the past month (Wall Street Journal qtd. In Merchant).
Even though pornographic data tracking has severe ramifications for queer
individuals in jurisdictions where homosexuality is outlawed, queer studies
have yet to address the connection between online pornography and the concerns
Thomas raises (Thomas believes this data tracking could lead to an Ashley
Madison-style data dump), perhaps because that would require a working
knowledge of the internet that the average computer-user doesn’t seem to have. Thus
I would like to finish by returning to Bassett, who argues for a mode of
scholarship which aims to “re-focus the project to re-think, through a newly
informed sense of what software is capable of effecting, what actors and what
kinds of acts are possible – and perhaps whether it is convergence or its
avoidance that might in some way be miraculous” (Bassett 120). What is software
capable of effecting, in the case of online porn? What actors and acts are
possible? Instead of considering, as The
Feminist Porn Book does, how actors of colour fit into the porn industry,
or fat porn stars have carved their own space within popular expressions of
sexuality, digital humanities can ask, by addressing on the level of code,
exactly who is an actor on a webpage – which third party is taking advantage of
a porn star’s fame by tracking your habits? which kinds of acts are their codes
allowing (are they recording data? which data? are they planting Trojans?)?
which kinds of acts are legally possible, and do some need regulation (e.g.,
revenge porn legislation is finally catching up to the possibilities that the
digital world so easily presents)? These are the kinds of questions that aren’t
being asked, but as much as certain sexual preferences affect someone’s life,
equally important sometimes is how the information about that person’s life is
used.
Works Cited
Bassett, Caroline. "Canonicalism and the Computational Turn." Understanding the Digital Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 105-126.
Fuller, Matthew. Introduction. Software Studies \ A Lexicon. ed. Matthew Fuller. 2008. 1-14.
Hayles, Katherine N. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Wilkens, Matthew. "Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method." Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/17>
Works Cited
Bassett, Caroline. "Canonicalism and the Computational Turn." Understanding the Digital Humanities. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. 105-126.
Fuller, Matthew. Introduction. Software Studies \ A Lexicon. ed. Matthew Fuller. 2008. 1-14.
Hayles, Katherine N. How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012.
Wilkens, Matthew. "Canons, Close Reading, and the Evolution of Method." Debates in the Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2012. <http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/17>