digital humanities and digital media

Johanna Drucker 45
RS: If you were a minister of education, what would you do about
media literacy?
JD: I’d insist that all elementary school kids learn to create and
critique data sets, know some basic statistics, learn database
structure, interface design, and know how to analyze search
engines, be able to do some scripting/programming, and be
taught how to do data wrangling and introductory digital media
studies. Skill in reading texts and images for their arguments as
well as their content remains essential, but across the full spectrum
of media formats.
Politics and Government
RS: Web 2.0 culture seems to have tamed and commodified the
wild, anarchistic Internet of the 1990s when people played with
identity in IRCs and MUDs and built their own websites in idiosyncratic
ways. Today, clarity and transparency are the dominating
values, and for obvious reasons, since only true and honest
information are valid data in the context of commerce. This shift
has also changed the role of the government. While in the 1990s
Internet pioneers such as John Perry Barlow declared the independence
of Cyberspace from the governments of the old world,
now it seems people hope for governments to intervene in the
taking-over and commercialization of the Internet by huge corporations
such as Google and Facebook. Thus, web activists calling
for the government to pass laws to protect privacy online,
and politicians suggesting expiration dates for data on social networks
appear to be activist in a battle for the rights of the individual.
Have tables turned to that extent? Are we, once rejecting
old government, now appealing to it for help?
JD: The Internet began as a government research project,
through linked cables connecting major research universities
and facilities that had defense contracts. So the Net and the Web
began under government jurisdiction. Concerns about regulation
cut across a range of issues –protections and violations of privacy
are only part of the larger landscape. The overarching disaster
of our lifetime is deregulation of all aspects of social life, the