Writing

In this article on “Of Writing Machines and Scholar-Gipsies” Christopher Keep comments on the teaching of humanities in universities with increasing presence of technology and machines. It is an interesting essay and does pose a few questions that should be considered. The first thought that I have is essentially in seeing the machines as tools in which the humanities (specifically literature) can be brought to life. I do not see that automatons or any other machine creation is a threat to the humanities or to human-kind as is possibly eluded to in this essay because the automaton is still an expression of the work of the humanities. The literature is an expression of the ideas of the authors of their age and the use of blogs, VR, video games or comic books in our age does not discredit the fact that they are still expressions of the authors’ thoughts. In fact, many of the ideas of literary works can be brought to life in “new” ways by the new media. The author essentially says this argument is not new because as works were translated into English the same debate was had of the appropriateness of translating these literary works as it would take away from what they represent. I suppose in many ways the same conclusions have been drawn as we create libraries and recreations of literary works within Second Life. The other main theme of the essay that I find humorous is that as humans we have created machine and then have used these creations to try to differentiate why we are different from them. The main way in which we are different is that we have created and have tried to express ourselves. In that way, are automatons, virtual realities, or games any different from literature?