I have relatives who joke that our family motto ought to be “if there’s a harder way, we’ll find it.” Like all jokes, this one rings true–at times painfully true. Everyone, of course, seeks convenience and yet we discover so often the opposite—new hardness, challenges, problems—that prove both uncomfortable and useful. Perhaps (if you’ll forgive the perverse suggestion!), critical digital teaching and scholarship should be harder as well.
How should we make digital technology criticism harder? How should critical engagement with tech discourse best carry on? What intellectual challenges does it currently face? What challenges must it face?
If you haven’t already seen it, Sara Watson released her new and significant report on the state of tech criticism last week. I am excited to announce the release of another kind of resource that just might help us keep after such questions—especially in our classrooms.
Please enjoy and share this freely downloadable, 35-page teaching resource now available on the Princeton University Press website:
Use this document as you will. Many may use it to support preexisting courses; a bold few may organize critical responses to it. The questions that prompted its creation are straightforward: Is it possible to gather enough material to generate and sustain a semester of discussion in undergraduate and graduate courses based on or around the volume Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016, now about $15 at PUP or Amazon)? Can this document, paired with that volume, sustain a stand-alone course? Whatever the answers, the document’s purpose is to complicate—not to simplify—keyword analysis for all. Keywords are supposed to be hard.
Each essay in the volume receives four sections of notes. (1) Background music suggests music that could be played in the classroom as students shuffle in and out of class; the music is meant to prompt students’ talking and thinking about the topic at hand. (2) What can we learn from the contributor listing? fosters the vital habit of learning to understand not only the reading content but also the author and his or her background. (3) Exercise suggests an activity to prompt discussion at the start of a lecture or seminar—and to be shared at the end of a class in order to encourage sustained thinking about a given keyword essay in the next class. Students may also be asked to bring prepared lists with them at the start of a class. Finally, (4) discussion prompts are meant to raise one thread of harder questions, not easy answers, for classroom debate. Most of these 555 questions are meant to model conversation pathways that elevate the theoretical stakes of thinking with and in language.
This document is in some ways an antidote to the editorial instinct to consolidate, polish, and finalize the topics raised in this volume. As the editor of this fine volume, I stand convinced that these twenty-five essays constitute state-of-the-art and definitive scholarly approaches to significant keywords. In fact it is because I am convinced of the volume’s virtues that I seek here to test them—and I know no better way to do that than to ask questions that unravel, challenge, and extend the threads of thought woven together in the essays themselves. I am sure I join my fellow contributors in inviting readers, students, and scholars to do the same with these essays.
“555 Questions” is also something of a methodological extension of Williams’s keywords project—that is, these 555 questions are meant not to provoke particular responses so much as, in admittedly sometimes slapdash and zigzag ways, to model the type of language-based discussion that all sensitive users of language may engage in on their own terms. In other words, most of the questions raised in these pages require little more than taking language and its consequences seriously—at least initially. I am sure I have not done so in these pages with any more fertility or force than others; nevertheless, I offer these pages as a working witness to the generative capabilities of language analysis to get along swimmingly with both the real-world empiricism of the social sciences and the textual commitments of the humanities. I have not questioned my own introduction to the volume, which I leave to others, although I’ll leave off with this quote from it:
“No one can escape keywords so deeply woven into the fabric of daily talk. Whatever our motivations we—as editor and contributors—have selected these keywords because we believe the world cannot proceed without them. We invite you to engage and to disagree. It is this ethic of critical inquiry we find most fruitful in Williams. Keyword analysis is bound to reward all those who take up Williams’s unmistakable invitation to all readers: Which words do unavoidably significant work in your life and the world, and why?”