The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
8 — Wednesday, February 17, 2021
statement
What is
digital
studies?
BY ALEXANDER
SATOLA, STATEMENT
CORRESPONDENT
I
n January 2019, LSA announced the
creation of a new Digital Studies In-
stitute that would support the study
of digital technologies from a humanities and
social science perspective. The establishment
of a formal academic institute followed the cre-
ation of the LSA Digital Studies Program in 2014
within the University’s Department of Ameri-
can Culture.
The DSI embraces an interdisciplinary ap-
proach, engaging different methodologies,
frameworks and discourses from across a vari-
ety of academic fields. The particularity of DSI,
however, lies in its singular focus on all things
related to the phenomenon of digital technol-
ogy. “We are the nation’s first one-stop shop for
all things digital,” claims the website’s “About”
page, “including digital media studies, digital
humanities, digital pedagogy, digital art, aes-
thetic practice and design, and critical thinking
about our digital future.”
There is a question that remains unanswered,
however, when we separate “the digital” from
the more traditional concepts of the humanities,
art and design: What are we studying when we
study digital technology?
There are two immediate answers to this
question. The first aims to explain what is dis-
tinctive about digital technology, namely its reli-
ance on binary numbers, Boolean logic and com-
puting. What differentiates digital from analog
electronics is the capacity of digital electronics
to process data in the form of digits, specifically
zeroes and ones, and to display that information
in a machine-readable format. Analog technol-
ogy, on the other hand, relies on representations
or analogies of information collected through
the continuous measurement of a natural signal,
such as a sound wave.
The second answer to our question of what
scholars of digital technology study, however,
relates to examining the historical emergence
of digital technologies and their impact on hu-
man affairs; to be sure, scholars in the DSI pro-
gram want to participate in the design of digital
devices, but they also want to be more than just
ethical consultants for engineers. With a vast
field of inquiry in front of them, there are fresh
opportunities to examine and understand the
technologies that seem to pervade almost every
aspect of our lives. What, then, is the role of this
new discipline, and how does an organization
like DSI push it forward?
***
Because digital studies cuts across so many
academic disciplines, the minor in Digital Stud-
ies attracts students from the humanities, so-
cial sciences, physical and natural sciences and
much more. With the growing salience of digital
technology in the everyday lives of students, not
to mention the general population, perhaps it
was only a matter of time before the study of its
relationship with art, society, ethics and politics
became supported on an institutional level.
To learn more about DSI on its own terms, I
reached out to administrators, faculty and stu-
dents affiliated with it. My first conversation was
with Lisa Nakamura, the director of the Digi-
tal Studies Institute and a Gwendolyn Calvert
Baker Collegiate Professor in the Department of
American Cultures. Nakamura, a scholar with a
breadth of experience on issues of race in digital
media, arrived at the University in 2012 to coor-
dinate what was then the Digital Studies Pro-
gram. Starting with the design of a curriculum,
she noticed that many students were drawn to
humanities and social sciences courses that ad-
dressed the role of digital technologies in society.
“We had courses for programmers already,”
Nakamura told me during our Zoom call. “But
they were applied courses, and these were more
(about) understanding how the digital world
works. You know, what everyday life is like on
social media, or why is it that women don’t feel
comfortable playing games that men might feel
comfortable playing?”
To meet this student de-
mand, Nakamura assembled a
“cheat sheet” of courses from
a variety of departments, in-
cluding Communication &
Media Studies, American Cul-
ture, English and the School of
Information. The courses were
targeted both to students with technical expe-
rience as well as other students from non-tech-
nical backgrounds. Soon, there were enough
students taking these courses to warrant going
to the curriculum committee to suggest the cre-
ation of a five-course minor in Digital Studies.
“So if we can offer a five-course minor, stu-
dents who have already done these things could
at least get some credit for it; it could be visible
on their resume,” Nakamura said. “So an English
student or an Art History student could say to a
parent who’s nagging them about ‘well what are
you gonna do with this degree’ and show them,
‘well, I’m taking a minor in digital studies.’ And
we made the argument that it would help stu-
dents show expertise and be more employable.”
According to Nakamura, big companies like
Oracle, Amazon and Microsoft have indeed hired
students with the minor for their expertise on
digital culture and issues of representation in
digital media. It is not hard to see why; in recent
years the shiny veneer of the tech industry has
given way to a somewhat more complicated im-
age. A recent article from the Pew Research Cen-
ter summarizing current public opinion studies
claimed that 64% of Americans believed that
“social media have a mostly negative effect on the
way things are going in the country today.” There
have been numerous influential books published
on the impact of algorithms on income inequality,
as well as the pernicious role of digital technology
in perpetuating racial discrimination. Largely due
to this shift of public awareness, tech companies
have come under increasing scrutiny for their im-
pacts on conflicts of class, race and gender, as well
as their role in spreading misinformation and
normalizing hate speech online.
While the minor in Digital Studies is de-
signed to look good on a resume, in the midst of
this recent shift DSI also promises something
else to its students. Throughout the curriculum,
there is a focus on fostering a critical approach
towards new technologies.
What is criticism, though and why is it neces-
sary to critique technology? First, it is essential to
note the vocabulary of critique that professors in
the humanities and social sciences employ. Cri-
tique is not the same as criticism, the latter mean-
ing the negative judgment of something. There is
a relationship between the two words, however:
Critique, in the sense of systematic examination
or analysis, can help us arrive at better-informed
judgments. The corollary of the critical attitude
is the evasion of dogmatism, which is the unin-
formed acceptance of an idea. The 18th-century
philosopher Immanuel Kant was instrumental
in working out the foundations of modern criti-
cism and rejection of dogmatism, having written
three major critiques in his lifetime. In his short
essay “What is Enlightenment,” he implores his
readers, “Sapere Aude! (Dare to know!) ‘Have
the courage to use your own reason’ — that is the
motto of enlightenment.”
The critique of technology, however, can be
particularly frustrating because of the extreme
positions taken either in support of or against
it. Technophiles are especially dogmatic in their
defense of permitting new technological inno-
vations in the name of freedom, no matter the
social cost. Conversely, technophobic, modern-
day Luddites are no less dogmatic in their de-
nunciation of technology, advocating radical
reconstruction of the existing means of trans-
portation, communication and distribution of
technologies in society.
Between these two extremes, there is a mid-
dle ground which neither categorically fetishiz-
es nor denounces technological innovations.
It seems to me that this is the kind of attitude
found at DSI.
Marisa Olson, the executive coordinator of
DSI, said she joined the Institute out of admi-
ration for the kind of critical work the students
and faculty are pursuing. Olson worked with a
number of other organizations investigating the
relationship between technology and culture
before arriving at the University, though she af-
firmed the unique approach she thinks the In-
stitute brings to the table.
“There’s fun stuff like playing video games
and the things that Lisa (Nakamura) is talking
about,” Olson said during our Zoom call. “But a
lot of it is really specifically thinking about tech-
nology in relation to race, gender, disability class
and access. That’s really our primary focus.”
Turning to a real-world application, Olson ex-
plained how the awareness of multiple approach-
es to the implementation of technology might
help students make a positive impact throughout
their careers. “The world tends to think about
technology as a straight thing, even in relation
to disability,” Olson said. “People might say, ‘let’s
make this great technical object that’s going to
really help disabled people’ and they don’t really
know what they’re talking about.”
Technological solutionism, a term coined by
the philosopher Evgeny Morozov, describes this
tendency of well-intentioned technical profes-
sionals to place their full faith in tech, thus ignor-
ing the perspectives of the people they are try-
ing to help. More than due diligence, interacting
with communities on the ground is an effective
means of ensuring that a proposed “solution”
will not create new problems of its own. When
dealing with humans, as much as with technol-
ogy, appreciating the nuances is key.
As an artist who creates work exploring the
impact of digital technology on society, Olson
often encounters an oversimplified, binary ap-
proach to judging the digital world.
“A lot of my artwork is about technology’s
impact on the environment,” Olson explained.
“And I would say, you know, we may have new
tools now to combat climate change like elec-
tric vehicles. But some of that is because of what
technology already did to the environment.
We may now have new ways to protest things,
but we may be protesting things that were also
caused by technology, so it’s a kind of a cyclical
sort of situation.”
At this point, it is clear that, in typical human-
ities fashion, members of our community who
affiliate themselves with DSI are interested in
critiquing actually-existing technology. Nothing
is safe from examination under the microscope
of the Institute’s various instruments of investi-
gation, synthesis and analysis; not even itself.
***
When the critical lens is suddenly turned
onto the critical theorists, there begins a mo-
ment of sobering reflection. The mission of the
Digital Studies Institute is to connect a broad
coalition of scholars and practitioners to study
the relationship between technology and cul-
ture, but to what extent is this merely an orga-
nizational myth? DSI, after all, exists within the
economic and bureaucratic constraints of the
university. How can we understand its forma-
tion within this institutional context?
The recent creation of DSI fits into a longer
historical trend of centers, programs and insti-
tutes. Especially among large public research
universities, such as the University of Michigan,
the University of California, Berkeley and the
University of California, Los Angeles, and elite
private universities such as Harvard University
and Stanford University, the 1960s and 1970s
saw a rise in funding for specialized centers,
programs and institutes associated with the ex-
plosive growth of university enrollment in the
post-War era.
Somewhat ironically, most of the research on
centers and institutes as a new organizational
form has come from the relatively new, inter-
disciplinary field of organizational studies, now
offered as an undergraduate major at the Uni-
versity. In 1972, the American academic Stanley
Ikenberry published “Beyond Academic Depart-
ments: The Story of Institutions and Centers,” in
which he recounts the results of an extensive sur-
vey on the origins, structure, functions and issues
surrounding institutions and centers. These new
kinds of academic institutions formed, accord-
ing to Ikenberry’s account, to conduct research
on specific social problems and thus to carve out
sub-disciplinary and cross-disciplinary niches for
their graduate students and faculty.
Central to the story of institutions and cen-
ters is the friction between these organizations
and traditional academic departments. The
perception that institutes and centers are “cash
cows” that drain funding from academic depart-
ments became widespread in their period of
early growth. Additionally, Ikenberry recounts
the frustrations of some faculty and administra-
tors who believed the university was too eagerly
“trying to be all things to all people,” indicating a
general misalignment of the mission of the uni-
versity and the various aims of its institutes and
departments.
Similarly, Jerry Stahler and William Tash,
in their 1994 paper, describe different types of
institutes in the modern university, contrasting
“paper institutions” that have no staff, no budget
and only exist in the minds of their members
to these new well-funded monolithic research
institutes. Especially among the more influen-
tial institutes, conflict and institutional gridlock
can arise when institutes compete with depart-
ments for faculty time, internal funding support,
research infrastructures like laboratories and
spaces and prestige.
How does DSI fit within these organiza-
tional frameworks? First, it is important to note
that DSI receives all of its funding from internal
sources; however, that does not mean it will not
apply for grants in the future. Second, the central
justifications for the creation of DSI are its inter-
disciplinary and flexible nature. It is an institute
that primarily serves undergraduates, graduate
students and faculty in their pursuit of research
pertaining to the digital world — research that
is almost certainly going to involve some level
of collaboration across disciplines. Third, DSI
is still quite small, so it is likely not yet drawing
money away from other similar programs, nor
will it necessarily need to in order to grow.
When I thought about what other programs
might be in competition with DSI, however, the
University’s Science, Technology and Society
Program immediately came to mind. Like DSI,
the STS program offers an undergraduate minor
and a graduate certificate to students who com-
plete the requisite courses. STS holds events on
topics of interest in the field and supports its
graduate students through workshops, reading
groups and small grants. On the level of meth-
odology and approach, both programs teach
students a number of critical frameworks and
methods to examine the interactions between
technology, science, biology and human society.
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