Big Data and Cloud Culture - To the Cloud: Big Data in a Turbulent World - page 192

production for a system that eliminates the spatial and temporal barriers
between the person seeking knowledge and the object of cognition. Fish
maintains that this is a state that most religions identify with the afterlife,
when people cast off the shackles of mortality and all of its limitations to
become one with the creator, the source of all knowledge. He admits that
no one in the ield speaks precisely in this way, but says they may as well
because, for digital humanists, their mission afirms a future of “expand-
ing, borderless collaboration in which all the inirmities of linearity will be
removed” (Fish 2012a). He cites Fitzpatrick (2011), whose book Planned
Obsolescence describes the limitations of traditional media and the social
relations that arose with them, maintaining that in a world of new media
“we need to think less about completed products and more about text in
process; less about individual authorship and more about collaboration;
less about originality and more about remix; less about ownership and
more about sharing” (p. 83).
In his critique of what he considers the theology of the digital humani-
ties, Fish is describing what I have called the digital sublime (Mosco 2004).
At the very least, the digital humanities mythologize the online world by
viewing it as means of transcending the banalities of everyday life, but even
more so by helping to bring about the end of history, the end of geogra-
phy, and the end of politics. In its extreme form, the digital humanities
are clearly theological in that they draw inspiration from the writing of
people like Teilhard de Chardin (1961), who envisioned mankind inding
unity with God through the noosphere, the literal atmosphere of thought
he believed was created by the growth of information. The work of Ray
Kurzweil (2005) on informational immortality and the singularity marry
Teilhard's theology with the digital world.
Fish also takes issue with the digital humanities on political grounds,
particularly the goals of democratizing the humanities by breaking
down the barriers that separate disciplines and the barriers separating
scholars from the general public. What makes Fish's critique interesting
is that he is not opposed to these goals per se, but he doubts that the
digital humanities can reach them. For him they are more like mythic
covers that justify the primary goal of gathering as much quantitative
data as possible on literary texts and other works of popular culture
to, at the very least, inspire new readings of texts and new assessments
of the process and the context of their creation (Fish 2012b). The