McGann
¶ 1 Leave a comment on paragraph 1 1 In Jerome McGann’s essay “Information Technology and the Troubled Humanities”, he focuses on the impending future of the humanities. In a few places, he mentions the benefits of the humanities quickly becoming digitized, but, all in all, his essay efforts surround the fact that we, as studentsof the humanities, will have to soon change our relationship with the humanities as we currently know it: “Today we have to try to master some new things. We have to learn how to make them and how to use them. To pursue that goal commits us to a demanding, and therefore humbling, adventure in knowledge. We will do this by becoming students again” (p. 62). Previously in the essay, McGann discusses the hardships that come with having such a divided society, that we are either quite young, or ancient. McGann states, “His humanistic training has him unprepared for the dynamo of the twentieth century” (50), implying that it was such a waste for us as humanists to go through all of the “training” to learn all we know currently about the humanities, because the humanities world is going to be a completely new one and we will have to train again.
¶ 2 Leave a comment on paragraph 2 1 McGann’s scale isn’t as widespread as to say the humanities department of the world, but rather the departments in world education. He incriminates the library for so quickly turning the tables of everything we know about a library, and making it instead into “virtually complete virtualization” (51), and this isn’t the only one that is going down in humanity flames, as are the textbooks, which he states are being published almost 80% less, from 1,000 copies down to 200 copies.
¶ 3 Leave a comment on paragraph 3 2 One of his biggest issues begins with the growing of the humanities away from text style into an entire new spacious world. In order to make the jump, we will have to do so “by hands-on collaborative interdisciplinary work” (52). The question is, however, how can we all become students of this new craft, when we are all on completely different levels of, one, preparation and willingness, and two, knowledge?
Refreshing the fact that everybody has to learn the new humanities is key. You can’t go forward in the humanities without learning the new things. But that isn’t to say that we should not also learn about the past ways of learning.