CHAPTER 1.1: FORMS OF FAILURE
Before these case studies are introduced, it is best to frame the methods that I will be implementing to relate these real-world situations with the technological disruption concept. Due to the inherent interdisciplinary nature of the digital humanities, a wide range of methodologies and frameworks are available for implementation within this project. I will be focusing mainly on the rigorous, close readings of texts that stem from English and a technical breakdown of hardware/software involved in the case studies through terminology from Computer Science.
To apply methods of literary analysis to non-textual forms of media implies that I might also stray into Media Studies territory. Though the analyses in the following sections will stray into disciplines outside of English and Computer Science, this is more due to how defining and applying the concept of technological disruptions will touch on a lot of different forms of human/computer interaction. This is similar to how Matthew Kirschenbaum’s interrogation of forensic materiality in computer hardware “draws heavily from bibliography and textual criticism” (13), but those aspects are not necessarily the whole of his methodology. As Kirschenbaum did in Mechanisms, I will also employ specific methodologies from my main two fields, but that does not mean that I will hesitate to draw on sources and techniques from outside of those disciplines.
With the explanation of how the technological disruption will be juxtaposed to other aspects of the digital humanities, I hope that it is now possible to minimize “the risk of conceptual vacuity” (Ekbia IX). There is nothing left but to give the foundational aspects of the technological disruption itself, so that we may introduce the case studies as examples of the concept’s execution in the real world. To briefly reiterate the definition given in the previous section, a technological disruption is a specific event/situation stemming from human-computer interaction (HCI) that intentionally subverts the expected usage of a virtual space. Note how though it is used as a noun, what is being defined is something with momentum. Technological disruptions are anything but static. For a technological disruption to exist, there are human actions that have preceded it and most likely a human observation that has identified an event as subversive.
Essentially, a technological disruption is defined through the human side of the human-computer interaction. It is a subjective definition that does not rely on the measurable failures of hardware/software—even if those failures tend to play an important role which will be interrogated later. There is not an empirical way to define whether a virtual event is a failure or not if we ignore all forms of technical failure (a.k.a. glitches and hardware malfunctions). In a somewhat circular line of reasoning, it would be accurate to say that a form of HCI cannot be categorized as a technological disruption until someone acknowledges it to be a technological disruption. They are judgments which can be contested by others, and only indicate a complication within the usage of technology, not with the technology itself.
Therefore, subjective methods can be used to uphold a subjective descriptor. New media art and prose can be indicators of the same interactions that technological disruptions categorize. As literary and cultural studies scholar Tung-Hui Hu said in his book A Prehistory to the Cloud, “the artistic avant-garde offer us a window into the bleeding edge of how new media might be used” (XXII), the same bleeding edge of technological interaction that will be explored in this thesis. To balance our new conceptual frameworks on this edge is the challenge we face in the following sections. In an effort to alleviate that burden, it is time to delve into the case studies themselves and see where theory intersects with reality.