New tools and methods, new ways of thinking and working — what might be called “theory in practice”– all needed time to move beyond text-based models and immerse themselves in the multidimensional world of the Web.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 8.
This passage grabs my attention because I think it echoes my personal experience.
Even though this is not a good way or attitude of learning, it shows me the potential of digital experiments. The digital version can happen faster and cheaper than actually trying out all the answers and results and finding the correct answer.
Growing up in the first decade of the 21 century, I experienced a lot of how the digital world shapes our thinking and work. In elementary school, I played a lot of computer games that I could start over again after playing them without worrying about the result. As a result, I often bring that way of thinking to my studying process. For instance, I usually try out all the answer options to a question without thinking the whole question through first.
Here’s another example of how digitization gives me new methods of approaching the world. When I was in high school, preparing for an exam at night. I was planning to call my friend and prepare for it together. But on that day, both of our phones did not work. We ended up in a game with a voice call function for players and called each other in the game. Without digitization, this would never happen. First, internet gaming would only be fiction. Second, since the internet and digitization provide us with many options, we tend to think about other alternatives when one method does not work.
In this class, I want to study the logic behind a digital trend like NFT or the metaverse. Just think about how our digital life was about five years ago. Digitization was happening so fast that most people did not have time to think thoroughly about its logic. When thinking about it myself, I cannot avoid my bias as a result of growing up during it, which can be far from reality in many cases. But in a class, we can gather opinions from people with different backgrounds and see reality more clearly.
