Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 37, No. 322.
        Department of Digital Humanities, University of Cologne
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        Date: 2023-11-18 15:27:15+00:00
        From: scholar-at-large@bell.net <scholar-at-large@bell.net>
        Subject: "social media is broken"

Willard,

Re “social media is broken”

If I were to incite a flame war I would move to the reductio: all media are
broken.

Instead I point to the diversity and variety of social media: Twitter, BlueSky,
Mastodon, Facebook, TikTok, Truth Social, Reddit, Discord (and this listing from
an Anglo perspective is incomplete). All worthy objects of study. But I am not
intent on troubling the border between Media Studies and Digital Humanities. A
variety of approaches are suitable to the ocean of discourse each with its own
disciplinary home.

I do want to raise a figure common to both disciplines that of the participant-
observer as a possible hedge against dualist choices:

study the ocean; don’t swim :: swim; don’t study.

Although I am tempted, I am not staking a hero vs monster story here. The
participant-observer alone doesn’t affect rhetorical choices and discursive
moves. The participant-observer works with a machine:

study swimming (with and without an aqualung) in the ocean

This is a theme familiar to Digital Humanists.

The machine may be a representation working on representations, a stack if you
will …

And so I turn to the image of contemplation you sent out into the world and the
results of putting it through a little cinematic machine:

[quote]
I think often these days of Kobayashi Issa's haiku:
"Slowly, slowly, O snail / Climb Mt Fuji!" Ironical--a proto-tweet!--, but then
haiku were written out, presumably on rice paper with a brush dipped in
hand-ground ink in contemplative surroundings, or so I'd like to think.
[/quote]

In my own thought experiment I invite the reader to insert an animation of a
snail climbing [a woodblock print of] Mount Fuji which image fades into a
[woodblock print of a] snail climbing [a woodblock print of] Mount Fuji

What does it mean to tell a snail to slow down? To contemplate the
contemplative?

François Lachance, Ph.d.
Life cannot be all told.
It is lived in the telling.


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