Frederic Gros just published a book called "Marcher, une philosophie", in which he explores "walking" as a process fundamental to (critical) thinking. The walk helps one think the world not only through its physicality (the sweat, the oxygen) but also the inability to write anything down as ideas go through the walker's head. If even the library is seen in this context as a static environment antithetical to the philosophical advantages of walking, then what else do we "lose" when we conceptualize/gather/shape/build knowledge online?
It is true that we could think of surfing the Web as a virtual equivalent to the physical walk, but not when it comes to the physiological responses triggered by physical movement. Perhaps most importantly, what kinds of associations and concepts escape us when we can so quickly log, jot down, categorize and archive our ideas on the computer?
In Drucker's "Graphesis and Code", for example, she mentions Peter Campus's digitally manipulated "Wild Leaves" (1995) and "Alice and the Fairies" (1917). If Drucker had inserted the images themselves either onto the text or as hyperlinks, what would we lose as thinkers faced with the de facto visual equivalent of what she is speaking of? What conceptual avenues would we be shutting down by not being able to invent these images, to basically "fail" to see them?
I find it fascinating that we so often (from the space of critical theory/the humanities) approach digital media (or any 'new' media) from a rhetoric of loss. what nostalgic drives might be implicit in such imaginings? certainly, there is loss but i wonder what work this rhetoric does for the humanities and what it obscures?
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