Literature: A Lifeline in the Sea of Digital Culture

Literature is a great way to come to terms with digital culture -- and I'm just talking about novels that explicitly deal with technology or its consequences, though there are some good ones of that sort. No, I mean the classics and I mean popular fiction. I mean travel literature and romance. I mean detective fiction and postcolonial fiction and all the rest. Digital culture is a swelling ocean that engulfs us, and works of literature can be our lifeline.

Coping with digital culture -- its novelty and utility, its efficiencies and distractions, its marvels and its tedium -- is a major theme of this blog and of my course in Digital Culture. To help in this regard, I've offered ideas on digital literacy; tools for better consuming information like Google Reader and diigo; as well as thoughts on using the new media with purpose, creativity, and for exploration. Consider literature one more strategy.

Miranda and Prospero from a seaside
production of The Tempest
(creative commons licensed by pyrogenic)

Literature, as it happens, provides a particularly rich mode of making sense of our brave new world.  This blog is called "brave new digital" in imitation of Miranda's comment in Shakespeare's play, The Tempest, when she first meets people on her enchanted island:

O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in't!

The name Miranda literally means "ought to be beheld," and the idea of wonder pervades Shakespeare's play: there is magic, spectacle, and surprise throughout. Much of this comes from her wizard-father, Prospero, whose powers have come about through what? Books.

Books have always been associated with secret knowledge, and they can unlock benign powers (like Prospero's) or more corrupt sorts (like those of Dr. Faustus). Like the new media of our day, the Renaissance's new medium, the printed book, spread the hope and vision of new worlds (Thomas More's Utopia), or it indulged in the scandalous, the trivial, and the ridiculous. Literature has always been a coping medium and a conceptual vehicle -- providing lenses that help us to shape our responses to changing circumstances. It seems more than appropriate to make use of its powers now.


Art and storytelling provide patterns by which humans have made sense of every context -- from the ancient Anglo-Saxons who chanted the folk tales about Beowulf to Charles Dickens reflecting on industrial age London. Literatures is, as Kenneth Burke says, "equipment for living." Not just a source of entertainment, wisdom, or high culture -- no, literature provides familiar frameworks through which we can encounter the new and tame it to our understanding. The Beowulf bard retold the tale so his people could make sense of their harsh world and find hope in facing the Grendels of their day; Dickens serialized his novels to a Victorian-age public  so they could know about and reflect on London's underworld, or legal system, or urban family life.

Literary Connections to the Digital Age
So, where does one start in linking literature with digital culture? Almost anywhere. The issues are are struggling with in our tech- and media-saturated world are the stuff that literature thrives on.

• New environments
  All our media and gadgets and our general dependence upon computers and machines has created a new environment that can be seen in positive or negative terms. We need only turn to works like More's Utopia or Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels to see how authors have dealt with such issues, including new social environments.
• Machines and science
  There are many books that deal with how people adjust to machines (Thomas Hardy, The Mayor of Casterbridge), deal with science (Mary Shelley, Frankenstein) or even encounter computer-mediated virtual environments (Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash).
• Travel, exploration, colonization
  If the internet is a frontier, even a virtual one, then the literature of travel can take us far. We can go back to Homer's Odyssey, or to the biography of Marco Polo, or we can explore the American frontier in Willa Cather's My Antonia. More contemporary works about travel include Jack Kerouac's On the Road. Novels of the sea provide a rich resource for thinking about the dangers and delights of a wide-open environment. We can study Herman Melville's Moby Dick or Jack London's The Sea Wolf.
• Identity
  Identity is a major issue in digital culture as we mediate who we are through electronic means, avatars, profiles, and various tools for extending or transforming ourselves. Literary works exploring identity are plentiful, from Shakespeare's Hamlet to Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray to Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own. 
• Knowledge and Communication
  Means of communicating or systems (machine or human) relating to knowledge are a big concern in digital culture. Many literary works deal with communication, such as Carson McCuller's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter or T. C. Boyle's Talk Talk. Other books problematize knowledge and its institutions, such as Stanislaw Lem's Solaris (which explores the limits of scientific and academic knowledge) or Vernor Vinge's Rainbows End (which addresses libraries and educational systems and interfaces in the digital age).

This is just a smattering. I could have gone on to list novels that deal with major digital-age issues like security, surveillance, privacy, and how relationships are mediated through various kinds of communication and technology. I mentioned a couple of science fiction titles, but there are so many more that could be brought to bear, from The Time Machine by H.G. Wells to Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey. But hopefully this will give you a taste.

My past students have made many such connections, and I refer you to a list of some of the literary connections to the digital age that they have made (here and here). Many of these were collected in this eBook, Writing About Literature in the Digital Age.