Rome, 22April 2013: For some participants of our second workshop, “Italian Interdisciplinarity in the Internet Age”, the afternoon ended with an intensive and illuminating discussion about the causes of contemporary interdisciplinarity, and about the specific influence of new communication networks. Our debate acknowledged the importance of technological progress, and distinguished between three significant elements: the physical dimension (new hardware), the digital dimension (new ways of creating and storing information), and the semantic dimension (cyberspace). We agreed that the existence of the last two depends crucially on the first, but decided that, for reasons of competence as well as time constraints, we would focus on the second and third domain. This allowed us to adopt a less technically specific definition of “Internet”: a network of communications that grants a computer anywhere in the world rapid access to any other computer’s information.
The semantic dimension (“cyberspace”), it was felt, has a particular relevance for the production of new works of art, but also for new forms of social organization and collective action. In this context, our discussion focused on hypertexts and the specific status of genre literature. Over the past decade, we agreed, the direct impact of the internet had been most conspicuous in relation to clearly codified literary genres and sub-genres, such as epistolary writing. At the same time, internet literature had encouraged new forms of reader involvement, i.e. movement and interactivity rather than self-distancing and passive absorption. For some members of our group these dynamics and textual possibilities were anticipated in interesting ways by the non-linear fictions and “open†narratives of the mid-Twentieth Century. For others, the emergence of collective and hypertextual narratives appeared more specifically linked to global communication technologies, and therefore unique to the internet age. We agreed that the dynamics of literary readership and reception were still under-explored, and that there was a substantial need for further enquiry, not only from a theoretical-philosophical perspective but also at the level of quantitative, sociolinguistic and socio-cultural analysis.
Our appreciation of the digital domain was largely undisputed. We acknowledged the importance of the internet as an archive for works originally published under “old” technologies. In this context, we emphasized the crucial role of digitalization, not only for the scholarly presentation of archival material, but also for the rapid and widespread divulgation of texts. The members of our group saw increased ease of access as a fundamental precondition for contemporary scholarly research, and a prerequisite for teaching and widening access. But basic “internet literacy” was a source of concern, in this context. It was felt that the digitalization of archival material and free and instant access to information were most beneficial to a highly educated minority, many of whom had been trained in more “traditional” learning environments. New readers without appropriate training, by contrast, were, in our opinion, likely to be disoriented by the millions of blogs, bulletin boards, and websites available online, and would probably struggle to recognize more authoritative sources. We further established that a genuine understanding of the physical domain (hardware), and of programming was the privilege of a small number of specialists, and that this had potentially worrying consequences. Finally, we expressed our concern about the fragility of digital information storage, which contrasts greatly with the solidity and durability of the book.
Finally, we made an attempt to relate the contemporary interest in interdiscplinarity to what we perceived as a profound crisis of traditional institutions of learning and research, in higher education. In this context, we referred to some recent attacks against “overspecialization” and the widespread view that scholarship in the humanities is self-limiting and self-referential. We established that this view is problematic. But we also expressed concern about the difficult and lengthy process of acquiring credentials in academia, especially for scholars working in the arts and humanities, where disciplinary boundaries are particularly open to re-interpretation. In conclusion, we agreed that disciplinary knowledge and interdisciplinary curiosity were equally necessary for the wellbeing of the arts and humanities, and that the “internet age”, despite its evident challenges, had enhanced our ability to think critically, to understand and criticize authority and tradition, to sympathize with the marginalized and different.
Plant Guilds http://jaromil.dyne.org/artworks
Permaculture urban laboratory http://urbaniahoeve.nl
