In Hayle’s pedagogical argument for increased focus into the field of Comparative Media Studies, she makes a distinction between information and interaction. Since those lines are blurred, her piece made me question what those differences actually are, and I found myself wanting to make lists of all our previously invisible assumptions about print media. One of those, may be that intelligence and information had to be stored in the body, internally, available for recall at any time. Now there seems to be a nearly biological argument for our seemingly worse memories: That our bodies adapt to what we need them to do. Now that our brains are collectively externalized in databases, we also call upon information when we need it – but we keep some of it elsewhere. Hayle may in fact be right that “databases are perhaps the dominant cultural form (16).”
I began to wonder if what can’t be measured, tracked, solved, and packaged into stats or visual data is increasingly valued. Will the status of a poem or a drawing or a feeling be elevated? Is this responsible for academia’s relatively recent turn towards the aesthetic? The question now isn’t whether machines becoming more like humans or vice versa, but what this new internal and external content feels like. What do time, attention, memory, communication feel like now? It is for this reason that I initially resist Hayle’s argument that the humanities are moving from a content orientation to a problem orientation (9). Perhaps I’m not understanding her correctly, but I believe we are deeply concerned with how content makes us feel, and should be. Problems will always be here.
