In the era of pervasive personal broadcasting, the art of oratory must be rediscovered.
Burdick et al. “One: From Humanities to Digital Humanities,” in Digital_Humanities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 11.
This passage stood out to me because of its significance in the modern digital era. As technology has progressed and become more readily accessible around the world, it has become easy to take for granted how easily we can communicate our thoughts and opinions with others. With just a couple of clicks, we can broadcast our personal thoughts, no matter how small or insignificant they may seem. As students, it’s practically impossible to escape this digital bubble!
But precisely because we live in an age of instant and frequent communication, it becomes even more important to engage in meaningful conversation. The qualities of good public speaking are especially important. This goes beyond just reaching a large audience and communicating frequently. It involves qualities such as persuasion, emotional resonance, and the ability to center a conversation around a thought-provoking idea. While I’m not the best at public speaking, it’s easy to recognize its importance in a world where technology has become the norm. It’s generally easier for us to emotionally connect with a human than with an AI chatbot, which makes it important for us to consciously work on the qualities that make human communication meaningful.
Under the large umbrella of Digital Arts and Humanities, I am excited to learn about data visualization. As a Statistics and Data Science minor, I have learnt different ways using R to model, analyze, and display data in interesting and helpful ways. So I am looking forward to discovering other platforms and methods that I can use to achieve similar or even very different results. I think that one of the most rewarding parts of research is when you do all the data wrangling and analysis, and finally display the results in a way that is easy to understand by anyone.
Hi Maina,
I completely agree. The digital bubble frequently leads to a kind of what-about-me-ism, also dubbed “bean soup theory” by someone on Tumblr. (Tumblr’s search and tagging systems are notoriously pretty bad and I could not find the original post.) The idea of “bean soup theory” comes from a comment under a recipe for a white bean soup– three kinds of beans, cream, butter, etc. The comment read, “One star. I don’t like beans.” Thus, “bean soup theory” is the idea that people on the internet apply absolutely everything they see to themselves without considering that maybe they aren’t the target audience, which causes an increase in inflammatory and poorly thought out, ignorant comments. And while there are conversational narcissists who take personal offense to everything ever said vaguely in their direction, I’ve found that people are much more empathetic in face-to-face conversation, adding one more reason that makes chatting with a person so much friendlier than chatting through a screen.