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.
