Digital Text Human

Marriott at Metro Center, Room 901, Washington, District of Columbia



I’m thinking.

I’ve spent my whole day thinking—aloud, internally, alone, jointly—churning others’ thoughts into new thoughts, transforming ideas into inspirations. I enjoy the process of thinking, which is essentially the process of writing, which itself is nothing but a thought thought through into a recorded sequence of visible words. If I had a choice, I’d spend my life thinking, leaving the basic aspects of life (buying, moving, selling, eating) to others. I have thought this way, I suppose, even as a child. I remember clearly the moment, on the field at Presentation College in Barbados, probably in 1970 or 1971, when I realized fully that humans were not something purer than animals, that humans weren’t some kind of perfected machines (which I’d always believed we were), when it struck me that I was as much an animal as the two toads mating in the grass at my feet.

Today’s thinking was realized in a small room occupied by about 55 people and two thick columns that pierced the space and served as barriers that isolated some of us from each other. I spent the day in the National Archives on Pennsylvania Avenue, in Washington, DC, with archivists, records managers, and librarians from across the country, and we thought about electronic data (records, papers, publications). Our central concern was what skills these professionals now need to manage these records well.

Today, one set of presenters spoke about the issues surrounding the preservation of the papers (many of which were not paper but digital) of the hypertext novelist Michael Joyce. The issues and complexities were interesting to consider, and the case study hit close to home, since I always think and frequently write about the difficulties preserving digital literature. But what I found most remarkable was that the presenters had not yet made the digital creative works of Joyce usable to patrons in a manner that would replicate the experience of reading these pre-HTML hypertext literary works. They plan to, but the work has not been completed yet. Keep in mind that a digital literary work that does not perform as it was meant to is actually something different from a digital literary work.

In the infrequent slow times of the day, another thought hit me: that we—those of us who read and write in this world of electronic data—are not simply humans, maybe we are something that exists on a higher plane, almost demigods. I realized that we are digital text humans. The digital world is not an extension of our world, but a central component of it. For that reason, we are digital. And what makes us human more than anything is text—not language (which is replicated to varying degrees in birdsong and whalesong), not the use of tools (which birds and some primates besides us use), not even in construction (since birds and beavers and other animals are wonderful engineers). What makes us so human—even though all humans don’t possess the skill—is our ability to transfer information over time by capturing our thoughts as visible coded messages. And that is what makes us text humans. And we are humans simply because we believe so, and what we believe is so.

In much the same way that our texts, digital and otherwise, are as human as we are.

ecr. l’inf.