How We Think: Digital Media and Contemporary Technogenesis

by N. Katherine Hayles

“How do we think?” N. Katherine Hayles poses this question at the beginning of this bracing exploration of the idea that we think through, with, and alongside media. As the age of print passes and new technologies appear every day, this proposition has become far more complicated, particularly for the traditionally print-based disciplines in the humanities and qualitative social sciences. With a rift growing between digital scholarship and its print-based counterpart, Hayles argues for contemporary technogenesis—the belief that humans and technics are coevolving—and advocates for what she calls comparative media studies, a new approach to locating digital work within print traditions and vice versa.

Hayles examines the evolution of the field from the traditional humanities and how the digital humanities are changing academic scholarship, research, teaching, and publication. She goes on to depict the neurological consequences of working in digital media, where skimming and scanning, or “hyper reading,” and analysis through machine algorithms are forms of reading as valid as close reading once was. Hayles contends that we must recognize all three types of reading and understand the limitations and possibilities of each. In addition to illustrating what a comparative media perspective entails, Hayles explores the technogenesis spiral in its full complexity. She considers the effects of early databases such as telegraph code books and confronts our changing perceptions of time and space in the digital age, illustrating this through three innovative digital productions—Steve Tomasula’s electronic novel, TOC; Steven Hall’s The Raw Shark Texts; and Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions. Deepening our understanding of the extraordinary transformative powers digital technologies have placed in the hands of humanists, How We Think presents a cogent rationale for tackling the challenges facing the humanities today.

Genres: Nonfiction, Theory, Philosophy, Technology, Science, Psychology, Internet

298 pages, Kindle Edition

First published April 11, 2012

Reviews

[Camille · Rating 3 out of 5]

A tad bit difficult to read, admittedly an academic work, it sometimes felt inaccessible to me as a reader. It discusses all things digital and of course the humanities, and the comingling of the two. Not for the faint hearted, it is a very difficult read.

[Mjhancock · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book I read by N. Katherine Hayles, "How We Became Posthuman," described what humanities and digital technology have to offer each other. This book, "How We Think," describes what humanities and digital technology have to offer each other. All right, I'm being glib; whereas Posthuman was in large part a discussion of how discussions of AI and technology progressed from Weiner to Maturana and beyond, How We Think is a much more nuts-and-bolts discussion of what the two disciplines have to offer each other. In particular, the first three chapters of the book explicitly describe what that fusion looks like, by going through a number of relevant projects. Hayles' main argument is a familiar one to those in digital humanities: modern society has been irrevocably changed by digitech, from our grand theories to the very way we think and process information, and the humanities has fallen behind the curve. The difference between this and many other approaches is that Hayles backs up her description with cognitive science, and offers what digital projects can do to bridge the gap. It's somewhat ironic, then, that the rest of the book is a fairly traditional close reading of a number of texts--but instead of literature, the texts are works that she believes speak to that gap. First up is Steve Tomasula's electronic multimodal novel TOC, and how it demonstrates how techics ala Simondon affect perceptions of time. Next is another chapters on technics, but by way of telegraph code books. It's really fascinating, and a glimpse into an entire way of thinking that is now entirely obsolete; it's really top-notch media history. The final section of the book, and the last three chapters, are on narrative and the database, an old digital media topic that Hayles borrows from Lev Manovich, but updates with discussions on how the split applies to modern geography, Steven Hall's Raw Shark Texts, and Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions. The book's end is rather abrupt, and the focus on texts in the second and third sections seem to violate the spirit of the earlier chapters. But for the most part, it's a very hard-hitting evaluation of technology and the humanities that manages to sell the value of both.

[Avery · Rating 5 out of 5]

I appreciate hayles' philosophy of science and her usage of the technogenesis concept.

Relative to her other work, this is somewhere between My Mother was a computer, Unthought, and electronic literature.
By this I mean many of her themes, computationalization, embodied cognition, machine cognition etc are in here. They are not fleshed out as deeply as in my mother was a computer or unthought. The reader who is specifically interested in cognition would be better off reading unthought first. In this book, chapters 1, 3-5 are most directly relevant to this topic. Chapters 2 and 6-8 are more literary criticism and lit theory works. They are good. As is all of hayles' literary criticism. But the focus is the implications of fiction. It is not hayles doing philosophy of science like in her other books.

5/5 regardless, it is well written and thought provoking. How we read, chapter 3, should be required reading for education classes in my opinion.

[Jerrid Kruse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well written and thorough. The book seems to pick up where philosophers like Ellul and McLuhan and Postman left off, but with more emphasis on a literary analysis of texts to illustrate how tech shapes us.

[Jocelyn · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was one of the most skillfully crafted pieces of work that I have ever encountered. Writing to what she dubs "Traditional Humanists" (as opposed to Digital Humanists), Hayles sets up an argument for embracing, rather than driving out, digital pedagogy and practitioners from the humanities.

The structure of the book is incredibly seductive. Hayles begins with sets of things that seem to be opposite (humanities and science, technology and humans, narratives and databases) and then shows how they can be brought together. The first section deals primarily with humanities pedagogy; the second section with her theory of technogenesis and the evolution of humans alongside machines, and the third part with what we might deem "textual objects" and a set of reflexive works of fiction.

By setting up her theory of technogenesis as a way of understanding how we evolve, Hayles creates an indisputable internal logic that supports her idea of the digital's place in traditional humanities pedagogy. The denouement is when she takes a set of multimodal texts and applies close reading to them, bringing her argument to a close and enacting the methods she suggested in the first part. It's a fascinating exercise in craftsmanship, enacting practice as you write about it, and persuasive writing.

But it didn't persuade me, so that's why it gets three stars.

[Ursa · Rating 4 out of 5]

DNF because the later half of the book is unfortunately highly specialized, thus beyond my comprehension and scope of interest.

My favorite part of the book is the Interlude where Hayles explains the concept and studies of Digital Humanities (also known as digital-based scholarship), Technogenesis (the idea that technology and humanity co-evolve by undergoing coordinated transformation), and different modes of reading employed in both print-based and digital-based environment. This is my first introduction to Hayles's work, therefore, I found her arguments really refreshing and thought-provoking. Although it took me quite a while to get through some parts of the book, the insights she presents is more enticing than frustrating. What I appreciate most is that Hayles's exploration is positioned between the practices of traditional scholarship and the digital technologies as she seeks for a harmony between digital regime and humanities.

In conclusion, she reassures us that the machine is in no way erasing humanity, in contrary, the development of technology is a part of a mutual adaptation with our society. Although I have my reservation on this assertion, this book is nevertheless a compelling and insightful mapping of the digital humanities. I might want to come back to it after a few more years.

[Chad Post · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't normally read academic works, but I've always really like N. Katherine Hayles's stuff because of the connections she draws between science and literature. In this case, she examines the influence of technology on how we think and what we can create and, for the first time ever, I finally came to understand why "digital humanities" could actually be interesting and not just a cliched fad-term for academics to feel like they're a million miles of the cutting edge.

The chapter about telegraph code books is really interesting, as are the analyses of Steven Hall's "The Raw Shark Texts" (a book I liked, but now am impressed by due to the existence of new pieces to that book that appear in various translations, online, etc., and which are cataloged here: http://forums.steven-hall.org/) and Mark Danielewski's "Only Revolutions" (which I think is unreadable, except in NKH's close + mechanical sort of way that reveals all of the Oulipian scaffolding that keeps this very strange book afloat).

But really, the whole thing is great and definitely worth reading.

[xDEAD ENDx · Rating 2 out of 5]

A pretty tediously boring book. Useful for Academics, Technocrats, and Educators. Not useful for partisans.

Cool, I get it, technology and human use of it are interrelated and "co-evolve," but I'm uninterested in tracing the evolution of and new techniques used in the humanities. This really just seems to look at the nuances of how the humanities serve an epistemological function for power. Attempting to differentiate between eras, as if one is substantially different from another, seems to hark back towards some idyllic stage in history rather than actually exposing power in order to destroy it.

[David Bell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Kate Hayles is consistently careful and convincing in her arguments, passionate about what both traditional literary scholarship and new digital scholarship have to offer. Certainly among the most coherent and provocative perspectives on how new media is transforming our cognitive experience, inviting the reader to eschew nostalgia for the era of the book and and simultaneously to avoid over exuberant new media cheerleading--in favor of a more rational approach to new ways of reading and thinking.

[Maribeth Voss · Rating 3 out of 5]

It was a shock to my system to make my way through an actual textbook-y academic work after hanging out in the Malcolm Gladwell/Freakonomics realm of soft social science for awhile. But the sections of this book that I actually understood were very interesting (the bits about close reading vs. hyper reading vs. machine reading) and this is something I'll be thinking a lot more about in the future as I struggle with social media integrating itself into my reading (and life in general), sometimes against my will.

[Joy · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was completely with Hayles for the first half of the book. She's right that human beings are evolving with the change in technology, and technology evolves, in turn, as a result of it. Our brains operate differently, and we use different skills than the past. However, I'm not convinced about her argument about narratives and databases.

[Steen Ledet · Rating 5 out of 5]

As always, Hayles writes a fascinating book and although I prefer, as usual, her theory syntheses, I admire her meticulous and historically founded analysis. Gat insight into another turn of the humanities.

[Katie]

For exams

[Sabina Hartnett · Rating 4 out of 5]

Useful for situating the reader in the modern academic mindset. Does a great job of outlining the role of Digital Humanities.