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February 22, 2012
Digital technology has ruptured, and completely transformed, photography. We know talk easily about film based photographers using outdated technology. It represents a nostalgia for techniques presently on the wane.
Gary Hall in "The Digital Humanities Beyond Computing: A Postscript" in Culture Machine Vol 12 says:
The digital humanities can be broadly understood as embracing all those scholarly activities in the humanities that involve writing about digital media and technology, and being engaged in processes of digital media production, practice and analysis. Such activities may include developing new media theory, creating interactive electronic archives and literature, building online databases and wikis, producing virtual art galleries and museums, or exploring how various technologies reshape teaching and research.
He adds that this field or, better, constellation of fields, is neither unified nor self-identical: it is comprised of a wide range of often conflicting attitudes, approaches and practices that are being negotiated and employed in a variety of different contexts.
Traditionally technology has been seen as a tool (as techne) which is used to bring about certain ends. Technology was understood as an instrumentality. This is assumed in utilitarianism. and it acts to repress the way that technology also change our experience of time, our modes of thought and, ultimately, our understanding of what it means to be human.
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