This week, I’ve been preoccupied by a project for my senior thesis. I plan to include a discussion of the text Izme Pass in my thesis, which is about electronic literature. Unfortunately, Izme Pass was only ever distributed on a 3.5 inch floppy disk that works on a specific operating system for a Macintosh computer and accompanied a paper journal publication called Writing on the Edge in 1991. Only thirty years have passed since this technology has dominated our culture, but it is now so obsolete that tracking down and getting access to a legible copy has proved to be a difficult task. In the case that I will not be able to find access to a computer that has the capacity to run the program, it’s been suggested that someone who does set up a Zoom call with me in order for me to read and peruse the text remotely and vicariously through them. 

I find it incredibly ironic that this electronic literature is so difficult to obtain or read, since at the time it must have been written under the impression that the technology used to make it should allow the work to be even more easily accessible and easily distributed than print literature. However, technology changes rapidly and becomes obsolete rapidly. I’ve found our discussions about old technology this week to be especially meaningful. Based on our reading of the piece “The Digital and the Human”, Ailee had suggested in class that although technological progress might at first dominate over cultural change, culture will change just as rapidly and soon match the speed of technology’s change. However, I am not sure that this will always be the case. I believe it’s true that culture adapts rapidly to adopt new technology, but the production and proliferation of new technology can cause the production of other new technology to grow at almost exponential rates. In reading the piece on Big Data, I was particularly struck by the suggestion that part of the reason size shouldn’t be a consideration for thinking about big data is because processing this data used to require supercomputers but now “can now be analyzed on desktop computers with standard software”. 

I find discussions about the ways in which rapidly changing technologies inevitably changes culture and cultural activities really interesting. Even more interesting are the ways in which we have to adapt our academic methods and understandings in order to suit these societal changes. I recognize how even the advent of linear filmmaking has influenced the field of anthropology, since that is a major aspect of this class and discussed extensively in Media Worlds. I’m interested to see how the changes of these current times might influence the field of anthropology in the future.