Computation and the Discourse of Crisis

Chapter
First Online:

Abstract

Crises are endemic to modern society. They develop when individuals or communities feel their goals are being undermined by modernity’s constant striving for renewal, and act as a way to privilege demands for change in an information-rich culture. The crisis in the humanities is an expression of this wider discourse, but has recently taken on a new inflection, conflating putative stagnation and decline with the increasing use of computers in humanities research. Proper interpretation of digital humanities, and the development of critical and methodological perspectives that can ensure new technologies benefit core humanities disciplines, requires that we step back from the discourse of computation and crisis and properly understand the technical affordances and limitations of computing technology.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in to check access.

References

  1. Allington, D., Brouillette, S., & Golumbia, D. (2016, May 1). Neoliberal tools (and Archives). The Los Angeles Review of Books.Google Scholar
  2. Armytage, W. H. G. (1965). The rise of the technocrats: A social history. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
  3. Bauerlein, M. (2008). The dumbest generation: How the digital age stupefies young Americans and jeopardizes our future (or, don’t trust anyone under 30). New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin.Google Scholar
  4. Beck, U., Bonss, W., & Lau, C. (2003). The theory of reflexive modernization: problematic, hypotheses and research programme. Theory, Culture & Society, 20(2): 1–33.Google Scholar
  5. Belfiore, E., & Upchurch, A. (2013). Humanities in the twenty-first century: Beyond utility and markets. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  6. Bell, D. (1973). The coming of post-industrial society: A venture in social forecasting. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
  7. Benkler, Y. (2006). The wealth of networks: How social production transforms markets and freedom. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
  8. Berry, D. M. (2011). The philosophy of software: Code and mediation in the digital age. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  9. Birkerts, S. (1995). The Gutenberg elegies: The fate of reading in an electronic age. New York: Fawcett Columbine.Google Scholar
  10. Bod, R. (2014). A new history of the humanities: The search for principles and patterns from antiquity to the present. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
  11. Booch, G. (2013). Deus Ex Machina. IEEE Software, 30(6), 14–16.Google Scholar
  12. Bostrom, N. (2009). The future of humanity. In J. Kyrre & B. Olsen et al. (Eds.), New Waves in Philosophy of Technology (pp. 186–215). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.Google Scholar
  13. Bouton, C. (2016). The critical theory of history: Rethinking the philosophy of history in the light of Koselleck’s work. History and Theory, 55(2), 163–184.Google Scholar
  14. Bynum, T. W. (2014). On the possibility of quantum informational structural realism. Minds and Machines, 24(1), 123–139.Google Scholar
  15. Capra, F. (1983). The tao of physics. London: Fontana.Google Scholar
  16. Carr, N. (2011). The shallows: What the internet is doing to our brains. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
  17. Carr, N. (2014). The Glass Cage: Automation and Us. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
  18. Castells, M. (1989). The informational city: Information technology, economic restructuring, and the urban-regional process. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
  19. Castells, M. (2010). End of millennium: The information age: economy, society, and culture. Wiley-Blackwell: Hoboken.Google Scholar
  20. Castells, M., & A, Yuko. (1994). Paths towards the informational society: Employment structure in G-7 countries, 1920–1990. International Labour Review, 133(1), 5–30.Google Scholar
  21. Christensen, C. M. (1997). The innovator’s dilemma: When new technologies cause great firms to fail. Brighton, MA: Harvard Business School Press.Google Scholar
  22. Chun, W. H. K. (2011). Programmed visions: Software and memory. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.Google Scholar
  23. Cohen, D. J. (2007). Equations from God: Pure mathematics and Victorian faith. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.Google Scholar
  24. Daniels, A. (2012, November). The digital challenge, I: Loss & gain, or the fate of the book. The New Criterion.Google Scholar
  25. DeDeo, S. et al. (2013). Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems. Entropy, 15(6), 2246–2276.Google Scholar
  26. Derrida, J. (1978). Writing and difference. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.Google Scholar
  27. Dodig-Crnkovic, Gordana (2014). Modeling Life as Cognitive Info-Computation. Language, Life, Limits: Proceedings of the Conference on Computability in Europe. Springer, 153–62.Google Scholar
  28. Donoghue, F. (2008). The last professors: The corporate university and the fate of the humanities. New York: Fordham University Press.Google Scholar
  29. Dourish, P., & Bell, G. (2011). Divining a digital future: Mess and mythology in ubiquitous computing. Cambridge, MA: The M.I.T Press.Google Scholar
  30. Ellul, J. (1964). The technological society. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
  31. Farman, A. (2012). Re-enchantment cosmologies. Anthropological Quarterly, 85(4), 1069–1088.Google Scholar
  32. Fish, S. (2011, December 26). The old order changeth. The New York Times.Google Scholar
  33. Floridi, L. (1999). Philosophy and computing: An introduction. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
  34. Floridi, L. (2008). A defence of informational structural realism. Synthese, 161(2), 219–253.Google Scholar
  35. Galey, A. (2010). Networks of deep impression: Shakespeare and the history of information. Shakespeare Quarterly, 61(3), 289–312.Google Scholar
  36. Galloway, A. R. (2014). The cybernetic hypothesis. differences, 25(1), 107–131.Google Scholar
  37. Geoghegan, B.D. (2011). From information theory to French theory: Jakobson, Lévi-Strauss, and the cybernetic apparatus. Critical Inquiry, 38(1), 96–126.Google Scholar
  38. Geraci, R. M. (2008, March). Apocalyptic AI. Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 76(1), 138–166.Google Scholar
  39. Giddens, A. (2013). Modernity and self-Identity: Self and society in the late modern age. Hoboken: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
  40. Gobbo, F., & Benini, M. (2014). The minimal levels of abstraction in the history of modern computing. Philosophy & Technology, 27(3), 327–343.Google Scholar
  41. Golumbia, D. (2009). The cultural logic of computation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
  42. Golumbia, D. (2014). Death of a discipline. differences, 25(1), 156–176.Google Scholar
  43. Greenfield, A. (2010). Everyware: The dawning age of ubiquitous computing. San Francisco: New Riders.Google Scholar
  44. Greif, M. (2015). The age of the crisis of man: Thought and fiction in America, 1933–1973. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
  45. Greteman, B. (2014, June 13). It’s the end of the humanities as we know it. The New Republic.Google Scholar
  46. Guldi, J., & Armitage, D. (2014). The history manifesto. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
  47. Habermas, J. (1987). The philosophical discourse of modernity: Twelve lectures. Cambridge: Polity in Association with Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
  48. Russo, J. P. (1998). The humanities in a technological society. Humanitas, 11(1).Google Scholar
  49. Schmidt, B. (2013, November). The data shows there’s no real crisis in the humanities. The New York Times. Google Scholar
  50. Wolin, R. (2011). Reflections on the crisis in the humanities. The Hedgehog Review, 8.Google Scholar
  51. Woiak, J. Designing a brave new world: Eugenics, politics, and fiction. The Public Historian, 29(3), 105–129.Google Scholar
  52. Yudkowsky, E. (1996, November). Staring into the singularity 1.2.5. Retrieved March 16, 2014, from http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/singularity.html.
  53. Zeilinger, A. (1999). Experiment and the foundations of quantum physics. Reviews of Modern Physics, 71(2), 289–297.Google Scholar
  54. Zittrain, J. L. (2008). The Future of the Internet—And How to Stop It. New Haven: Yale University Press.Google Scholar
  55. Zuckerman, E. (2013). Digital cosmopolitans: Why we think the internet connects us, why it doesn’t, and how to rewire it. New York: W. W. Norton.Google Scholar
  56. Zukav, G. (1979). The dancing Wu Li masters. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar

Copyright information

© The Author(s) 2017

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.King’s Digital LabKing’s College LondonLondonUK

Personalised recommendations