digital humanities and digital media

Introduction 39
on the digital highway does not have, as a kind of “divine algorithm,”
a built-in emergency brake in case human reason turns
out to be devastating?
Despite learning from the past and despite predictive analytics:
with regard to the future we are blind. We may, hearing
the diligent workers around us, celebrate the arrival of a
better world, while in fact people are digging our grave, as it
happens to Goethe’s Faust. After a symbolic dialogue with the
Sorge (which means worry but also care in German) whom he
dismisses and who punishes him with blindness, Faust mistakes
the Lemuren digging his grave on Mephisto’s order for his workers
building a dam to defy nature. 26 Is this our situation? Are
we, without worries and care, blind about the implications of our
actions? Are we facing an inhuman, adiaphorized society while
hoping big data and algorithmic regulation will make the world
a better place? Are we turning ourselves into objects of “panoptic”
control by pursuing datafication and the ubiquity of smart
objects? Is the rise of the machine the end of men? To come back
to our philosophical references: Does Hegel’s Absoluter Geist
(the single mind of all humanity that becomes self-aware and
free through the march of reason) reach its destiny in the form
of artificial intelligence? Is the Kantian capacity for reason fulfilled
once human consciousness is passed on to machines? Or is
it rather overdone?
There are many questions to be raised in light of ongoing
technological development. Media literacy, without a doubt, is
important and has to move on from vocational “How”-questions
to critical “What for?”-questions, from “How can I use these
media?” to “What do they do to us?” It is important to understand
media in their historical context and from an anthropological
perspective. As the following interviews demonstrate,
in such endeavor not only contemporaries such as Nicolas Carr
and Sherry Turkle can be helpful and inspiring but even pre-digital
ancestors such as the French Blaise Pascal and the Swiss
Max Picard. If the discussion aims at a philosophical treatment
rather than a phenomenological approach people tend to turn to
Gilbert Simondon, Manuel DeLanda and Vilém Flusser. As these