Against Digital Humanities

English academia is perhaps second only to the clothing industry in being beholden to trends, fads, and flash-in-the-pan fashions.  It may seem strange for a field that focuses so much on classics and long-dead writers to care so desperately about appearing "cutting-edge," but here we are.  The current big buzz-word in the discipline is the "Digitial Humanities."  As flashy as that may sound, it's basically just another mode for transforming critical-thinkers into clerks, tricking humanities scholars into pursuing the very careers in data-entry and website maintenance that we all entered English to avoid in the first place. 

To be clear: I am not opposed to on-line archiving.  At all.  It makes research so much easier, and the Medieval monks who had to travel cross war-torn dukedoms to access another monastery's meager library would have committed murder to have the on-line resources we now have (and to think we mainly just use 'em to look up pics of funny cats!).  Three cheers for digital archiving, and I mean that sincerely!  No, what I am resisting is not databases, but this fetishising of all-things-digital, as though that is what will finally appeal to the born-and-bred-in-cyberspace Millenials who certainly "don't read" anymore.

To which, I can only respond with the following article, about how, according to a Pew study, it is actually Millenials who are reading books the most nowadays.

The typical click-baity Slate headline aside, it actually makes total sense to me that the children of the internet age would understand better than anyone the need to take breaks from the internet. I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as it is mostly the older professors (ironically) who keep making a big deal about the "Digital Humanities" as somehow the future and salvation of English academia, oblivious to the fact that all the Millennials entering the field now do so specifically to get away from the digital--we're surrounded by it, we're saturated by it, we're sick of it, and crave something more substantive than the flashy and the ephemeral, the same way a starving man in a desert craves water.  In fact, in my experience, even among non-English majors the appeal of this discipline to the rising generation is in how it offers those very things that can't be googled.

Last week in my class, most of my freshmen confessed, almost sheepishly, non-bragging, that they don't even watch much TV much anymore. And why would they? They are already drowning in digital media, they don't need college to force more of it on them, like a kid after Halloween with a tummy-ache forced to keep eating sugar.