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.