Digital Culture and Literary Studies

Moby-Dick as a Paragon of the Literary Side of Digital Culture.

The humanities are about the expressions of the tensions and realities of human life. In the digital age, literature introduces us to the key tensions of living in and making sense of a wired world. The challenges of the digital age are not different from those of previous generations except they are being applied to rapidly advancing technology. Moby-Dick is a worthy text for the mediation of digital and literary themes because of its commentary on the tensions of human life. 

The debate over the creation and classification of content is a major debate of the digital age. The digital age has introduced tools such as Diigo, Pinterest, and Storify for classifying and sorting out information, but the idea of categorizing as a means of understanding is nothing new. In his chapter on “Cetology” in Moby-Dick, Ishmael attempts to introduce readers to the variety of whales that live in the ocean and their place in the animal world. His use of literary terms such as “folio” and “quarto” for classifying whales by size brings up the question of how we classify literature in general (Melville 119). Moby-Dick in itself is an interesting text because it is difficult to label as either a novel or an encyclopedia or a memoir because it breaks or bends the rules of each of these genres in some ways. Classifying Moby-Dick is one thing, but classifying digital content can be another fish entirely. However, understanding how literature is classified offers good perspective for understanding the nature of the other: if you know what something is, you know what to do with it and how it works. If something is a combination of genres, you may identify it by its different components. 

Kaylee analyzed the travel industry in the digital age. Moby-Dick, Kaylee remarks, is Ishmael's travel narrative.   Another way Moby-Dick can be seen as a travel narrative for the journey of navigating an ocean of information on a search for a specific goal or experience. Just like in the tourism industry, Ishmael brings together lots of information to create a journey for the reader, evaluating best and worst sources and ideas to sell his experience. Kelsey focused on the role of metadata for her research project. Analyzing metadata works for making sense of massive amounts of information to find meanings and interpretations. This sort of information can be put to good use. Kayla Swan, who focused on online citizen journalism, saw Ishmael as the ultimate citizen reporter, faced with questions on the ethics of sharing the story of the Pequod and the responsibility to help readers understand the situation he observed. 

Another context for the study of literature in the digital age is in terms of the role of mythology. Mythology is nothing new, but today's modern myths of movie franchises and fandoms are perpetuated online through digital culture, and the popularity of the mass media is faced every day by individual students. Moby-Dick has its own mythology in popular and academic culture, but in addition to this it is a metaphor for the role of mythology: the White Whale is the ultimate myth, Ahab is the ultimate believer in this myth; and Ishmael questions a lot of what he sees on the ship and in the mythology of whaling. Every individual within a mythology interprets a myth's symbols and their functions differently, as Ahab's officers question the symbols of the dubloon (385-89). Furthermore, every individual defines mythology differently, and they use it and remix it at will: online content proliferates and remixes copyrighted material regardless of restrictions. As Ishmael observes of whales, and perhaps of humankind's ideas, one man's loose fish is another's fast fish (354). 

Finally, evaluating the tensions of literary and digital cultures requires entering the conversation online. The conversation is as old as time itself, but the medium is new and it is in a lot of different ways to a lot of different people, not just scholars. Studying digital culture in the context of literature allows students to see their ideas as a means to participation as well as an end to self-expression.

Embracing the Creative Mode of Literary Studies Through Remix

For the optimal study of literature in the digital age, I propose an approach based on remixing and remaking the content of original texts and analyzing such re-creations of studied texts. The purpose of this approach is to allow students to have broader perspectives of literary texts other than those discussed in a formal classroom or scholarly setting. One of the main difficulties of the age we live in is being able to identify different perspectives and negotiate them. Placing a text in a different format can allow for different understandings of the text than otherwise possible. The curriculum of a literary course can be broadened to include re-tellings and adaptations of original texts, including dramatized adaptations as well as children's literature, recreation in a new genre, and remixed online content. Recall that some of the first popular novels of the eighteenth century, including Pamela and Camilla, were written in epistolary form. Frankenstein's frame story is a series of letters of a sea captain to his sister in England, in which he encloses the main story. Some passages in classic literature, as in the the books of Psalms and Isaiah in the King James Bible or Ahab's monologues in Moby-Dick, can be rewritten as poetry, and rewriting prose passages as verse can isolate words, rhythms, and other aspects of the passage that allow for consideration of the text as poetry.

 In a course based on remixed content from classic literature, students will also be encouraged to find, create, and share online remixed content such as memes, blogs, videos, and pop songs or raps. These different media allow for different perspectives of the original texts and enhance their studies. Epistolary literature or dialouge can be rewritten as a series of tweets on Twitter or status updates on Facebook. A course based on the remixing of classic texts will emphasize both the creative and academic aspects of literary studies. Allowing students to create their own content gives them a sense of empowerment, allows them to share their perspective about the content in question, and gives them a personal bond with the course material. 

Traditional academic scholarship will neither be disregarded nor held up as the sole standard for literary understanding, but both approaches will be emphasized as a medium for finding meanings within texts. A course based on remixing classic literary texts is meant to allow students to think about literature in terms of its complexity and the relevance of its ideas in today's world.