The Year in Digital Humanities: 2012
In spite of apocalyptic predictions, 2013 is upon us. In honor of the new year, I present the (second annual) Year in Digital Humanities: the most notable stories in technology from 2012 and what it means for scholars in the Humanities.
1. Science captures the public’s imagination, with a little help.
Space missions have long been the subject for public consumption and entertainment, ever since the iconic footage of Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the moon. Armstrong sadly left us this year, but exploration of the solar system continues to grab public imagination as proven by NASA’s Curiosity rover. The car-sized rover touched down on Mars on August 6 and continued to accomplish a number of firsts on the Red Planet: the first streaming of a human voice from the surface of another planet, the first laser shot on Mars, taking its first Martial soil and rock samples, and even uncovering an ancient stream bed. Oh, and it was the first foursquare check-in on another planet.
Back on Earth and among scientists, the biggest story of the year—of the decade? in decades?—was the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson, that “missing” particle that sparked the massive project over at CERN. Few of us outside the Physics department have the training to really understand why this thing is so important, but even fewer can deny that it is. That’s because in addition to the discovery itself, the marketing campaign that has surrounded this elusive little thing—from artists’ representations to talk-show circuits to award-winning books and miniseries—has grown into an accomplishment all its own.
What it means for digital humanists: All this inspires a natural question: if physics can advocate so well for their research programs while educating the public on the relevance of their vastly complex discipline, why can’t humanists do the same? I’m thinking something like “the God particle” but for Foucault. Take it as a challenge for 2013.
2. Social media showcases some unexpected winners and losers.
Winners:
Pinterest: After being named the Best New Startup of 2011, the site boomed in 2012, becoming the fourth-largest traffic driver in the world—referring more business in January than LinkedIn, Youtube and Google+.
Instagram: In April the photo-sharing app was bought by Facebook for $1 billion. In August, Instagram topped twitter for daily active users for the first time and reached 80 million users and counting.
Anonymous: After its largest attack yet in January against SOPA supporters, the Anonymous Group was named ‘Most Influential Person’ by Time magazine.
Barack Obama: President Obama scored two historically viral posts in 2012: His response to Clint Eastwood’s infamous “chair” speech (“This seat’s taken”) was the most RT’d tweet of the RNC, and his victory Facebook post (“Four more years”) was the most liked post ever with over 4 million likes.
Losers:
Google+: In February, the Wall Street Journal reported that the average person spent 3.3 minutes on G+ compared to 7.5 hours on Facebook per month. The People’s Republic of China took advantage of lax G+ censorship and began posting off-topic comments on Barack Obama’s official election campaign pages. In April, G+ shut down its photo editing site Picnik, and during the month of June, it was reported that 30% of users who make a public post on Google+ never make a second one. Ouch.
Apple: Apple suffered badly from the fiasco surrounding its Maps app—including egregious inaccuracies. Samsung’s Salaxy S3 rivaled the iPhone 5 in both hype and sales.
Call It Tied:
Facebook: While Facebook gained its 1 billionth member in September, its stock price fell to $21.83 a month later.
KONY 2012: When it was released in March, the video receives more than 87 million online views. But after a wave of controversy, the follow-up video is released and receives half a million views on Youtube within a week. It still doesn’t reach the top spot in the contest for the most watched video in Youtube history: That honor goes to PSY “Gangnam style” with 1 billion views and counting.
What it all means for digital humanists: The already-dubious offline/online dichotomy became veritably irrelevant in 2012. Virtual worlds develop simultaneously with “real world” events—so much so that the analytic distinction between the two has become incoherent. Technology has become public while the public has become virtualized.
Also, Google and Apple are not indefatigable.
3. UC logo snafu proves that people really, really care about design.
Shortly after University of California showcased its new logo, masses of outraged students and alumni rallied in protest. Nearly 55,000 people signed a petition saying “the logo was overly corporate, resembled—among other things—a fruit label and did not sufficiently reflect the university’s prestige." The redesign was lambasted in comments and memes that circulated broadly on social media.
What it means for digital humanists: Besides a lesson in bad design, the logo snafu proved that when students mobilize via social media, the University must take notice. Unfortunately such mass mobilizations tend to occur over aesthetics more than politics:
What it means for digital humanists: Besides a lesson in bad design, the logo snafu proved that when students mobilize via social media, the University must take notice. Unfortunately such mass mobilizations tend to occur over aesthetics more than politics:"It's good that UC is listening to us," said Connor Landgraf, student body president at UC Berkeley. "Hopefully they'll start listening to students on other issues, as well, such as tuition increases."
See a story that I missed? Add it in the comments!
Tech on TV: New Representations in Technorealism
When asked for the most important commentaries on new technology and society, one often thinks of cyberpunk classics such as Blade Runner, The Matrix, The Terminator, and so on. Indeed, it is well accepted that the best social commentary on technology lies in the genre of science fiction. Building off the tradition set forth by Mary Shelley’s Franksenstein, Aldous Huzley’s Brave New World and H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, new movements in science fiction have commented on developing and future technologies such as computers, the Internet, artificial intelligence and prosthetics with a critical and often distopic eye.
Recently, though, film and television-makers have attempted to capture a more realistic representation of new technologies and our interaction with them. Films such as The Social Network, along with television programs The Wire and Gossip Girl, are distinctive in that they are among the first attempts to narrate the rise of new technologies, social media, and the Internet in a fictional yet realistic framework. Instead of gesturing towards a prophetic or ominous future with technologies that may be, these works portray technologies that exist now, but have yet to be understood. How these works represent technology, from both a user and developer perspective, reveals as much about the gadgets themselves as our collective feelings about them. To the extent that these productions reflect our own hopes and anxieties, they can shed light onto both the potential/pitfalls of technology as well as the nature of our politics, society, and human condition.
Consider, for instance, The Wire, which ended several years ago but continues to inspire critics and scholars alike to plunge its depths of social commentary, including its important presentation of technology, particularly mobile and surveillance technologies. What is noticeable here is not only the cat-and-mouse game between the police and drug pushers over who can outsmart the other with their technological innovation, or even the amusing mini-documentary on the history of the mobile phone (who can forget the dues ex machina of the picture phone at the end of the forth season?). Besides all this, The Wire’s greatest achievement was its accurate portrayal of just how important institutional and organizational barriers are to the usage of technology in the first place. In short, a personal computer does not a James Bond make.
To see how realistic The Wire’s consideration of technology is, one needs only contrast it with another techno-heavy yet techno-utopian show, 24. As one blogger noted, although surveillance technology dominates the worlds of both shows, “Fox’s 24 bows in awe of the omnipotence and omnipresence of satellites and fiber optics, while HBO’s The Wire regards phone taps and recording devices suspiciously, as flawed tools that reveal the corrupt nature of bureaucracy and are, at best, necessary evils.” In 24, cool gadgets seem to come out of thin air, with no costs or bugs to bog them down. In contrast, characters on The Wire are constantly battling the expense of technology, its daunting complexity and its limited access.
Or take The Good Wife, a legal/political drama set in an age of 24-hour cable news, and which the New Yorker labeled definitive as “the first great series about technology.” What looks like a typical “case-of-the-week” legal show goes to new innovative heights by incorporating a vast array of technology stories straight from the headlines. In the second season alone:
Lockhart Gardner took a case involving the online currency bitcoin; used Twitter to upend British libel laws; handled a military case involving drone warfare; litigated crimes featuring violent video games and a “date rape” app; and dealt with various leaked-image disasters (a corporation fighting a viral video, an Anthony Weiner-like dirty photograph).
The Good Wife is notable not only for its emphasis on technology but also its approach, incorporating nuance and accuracy in a debate that is so often saturated by reductive punditry. Particularly enjoyable is the show’s criticism of the 24-hour cable news racket, which itself goes to great lengths to solicit our Twitter feeds and then proceeds to broadcast “experts” who warn us that Twitter is making us stupid.
While The Good Wife is perhaps the first great series about technology, it is certainly not the first series about new technology or social media. Gossip Girl earns that title, which I do not expect The New Yorker to follow but remains important nonetheless. Gossip Girl was not only the first mainstream series about a blogger; it was also the first to present plotlines that effectively blurred the lines between online and offline experience with plotlines that pivoted around the mobile phone. (It was also one of the first series to air its episodes for free online.)
At first glance, Gossip Girl might appear to be a cautionary tale for would-be Twitterers, or at least a dismal portrait of what happens when you mix teens and texts. And indeed, if SMS was a character on the show, it would probably appear as shallow and frivolous as Serena Van Der Woodsen. But what makes Gossip Girl astounding for me is the utter ubiquity of information technology in a narrative format that pretty much plagiarizes Edith Wharton and other classic high-society literature. (It surely wasn’t an accident that the high schoolers put on a production of The Age of Innocence in season 2.) For all the IT window-dressing and Web 2.0 antics, the show is really about mistaken identity and elite scandal, a theme that has existed for quite sometime despite our current anxieties that texts make sex.
Shows like The Wire, The Good Wife, and Gossip Girl mainly focus on the user experience when narrating technology and generally do a good job in rising above the reductivism that so often accompanies debates on tech. But there is the developer side as well, and here productions like The Social Network become relevant, as do some thrillers such as Hackers, Antitrust, and Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Much has been written on these films and I would encourage readers to explore those commentaries, but it is worth repeating here that the figure of the “geek” remains a contentious one, especially among us real-world programmers. The stereotype of the antisocial, Aspergersy computer nerd seems to be challenged only by the equally problematic “computer programmer as evil genius” archetype. The latter is quite clearly showcased in the newest Bond movie Skyfall, which casts new technology as the enemy, even as it fails to portray that technology accurately.
What is sorely lacking in these narratives is nuance. With Freaks and Geeks and The Big Bang Theory, comic-book nerds have become lovable, but computer geeks remain weird. I wonder whether a typical doctors or lawyers series (think: ER, Grey’s Anatomy, The Practice, Ally McBeal) could be refashioned for Silicon Valley. Then I become more interested in why such a pitch remains unaired, unmarketable, and even unthinkable. Perhaps a clue lies in last year’s SOPA debates in Congress, wherein our national lawmakers repeatedly referred to Internet developers as “nerds” instead of experts.
The best of these works may be considered a movement in technorealism, which attempts to forget a middle ground between techno-utopianism and neo-Luddism by eschewing technological determinism in favor of a historical and sociological approach to technologies. Here, the Internet can be both good and bad, contingent on our interaction with it, much like previous technological developments:
Integral to this perspective is our understanding that the current tide of technological transformation, while important and powerful, is actually a continuation of waves of change that have taken place throughout history. Looking, for example, at the history of the automobile, television, or the telephone -- not just the devices but the institutions they became -- we see profound benefits as well as substantial costs. (Technorealism)
Why should the “realistic” portrayal of technology (as opposed to science fiction) be included in the corpus of social-technological commentary? The answer, I suggest, is because these representations are not only representations but also social objects themselves. That is, these works are some of the first attempts into the historiography of new technologies, and like all histories, should be taken as social objects specific to the time and place of its construction.
What is important to realize is that a comprehensive history of new technology would include not only a story on technology’s invention, diffusion, and usage, but also on our contemporary representations of it—our fantasies and anxieties, our mundane interactions and political struggles, our stereotypes and surprises.
Of course, the history of 21st century technologies is still being written. But we are starting to see early representations of that history—sketches of what will be museum exhibits and textbooks in the near future – assuming, that is, if museums and textbooks still exist.
Internet Censorship (Part 1): The Technology of the Working Web
Despite the guarantee of free access to information enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human rights, the number of countries engaging in some kind of internet censorship continues to grow rapidly around the world. The issue of internet censorship is now central in policy, communication, and technology debates. It has also become of interest to scholars in the humanities and social sciences who think seriously about the relationship between culture, politics, and the internet.
But in order to build a rich conversation about the causes and consequences of internet censorship, we must first understand how internet censorship works, especially on a technical level. This two-part post lays out a (simplified) explanation of internet censorship technologies. The first of these gives a broad overview of how the internet works, while the next post builds on these foundations to explain how various censorship techniques can block information on the internet.
How the Internet Works
To understand how internet censorship works, as well as how to circumvent such obstacles, we must first get a grip on how the internet works. Consider this over-simplified model of just what happens when you view a webpage.
When you log onto the internet at your home, office, school, library or internet café, you are connecting through an Internet Service Provider (ISP), such as Comcast or AT&T. The ISP then assigns your individual computer an IP Address, which is similar to a postal address in that it is used to identify you and transport information. Anyone who learns your IP address can find out what city you’re in, and other institutions such as your ISP, internet café, library or business can find out more, such as which building you are in and even which computer you are using. Government agencies, to the extent that they have access to said institutions, may know these details as well.
Like computers, web sites have IP addresses as well. When you browse to a certain web page on your computer, you are actually requesting information from a particular IP address. For instance, the IP address of the THL site is 174.129.208.156. (Try entering that into your browser window – it goes to THL!) But because these IP addresses are cumbersome and difficult to remember, the Domain Name System (DNS) allows IP address to be associated with human-readable “domain names” such as townsendlab.berkeley.edu.
So, when you type in http://townsendlab.berkeley.edu into your web browser, a series of things happen:
- Your computer sends the domain name "townsendlab.berkeley.edu" to a selected DNS server, which returns a message containing the IP address for the server that hosts the Townsend Humanities Lab (currently, 174.129.208.156).
- The browser then sends a request to your ISP for a connection to that IP address.
- The request goes through a series of routers, each one forwarding a copy of the request to a router closer to the destination, until it reaches a router that finds the specific computer needed.
- The message from the Web site to you travels through other devices (computers or routers). Each such device along a path can be referred to as a "hop"; the number of hops is the number of computers or routers your message comes in contact with along its way and is often between 5 and 30.
- This computer sends information back to you, allowing your browser to send the full URL and receive the data to display the page. Et Voila!
In order to send packets of information around from server to server, ISPs must rely on set internet protocols as well as on national and international infrastructure that supports such connections. This set of structure and conventions are commonly referred to as the “backbone” of the internet.
Protocols allow data and resources to be shared in a coherent way. For instance, the internet uses the concept of numbered ports to manage connections into different kinds of requests. For instance, normal web-browsing uses port 80. But the Web is only one facet of the internet. File transfer, for instance, uses 20/21 and email uses 25, 53, or 143. Try entering “townsendlab.berkeley.edu:80” into your browser. It works because that’s the default port for web browsing. Now try “townsendlab.berkeley.edu:20”. Hint: it probably won’t work.
The backbone is also made up of major network equipment installations which are connected to one another via fiber-optic cables and satellites. These connections enable communications between Internet users in different countries and continents. National and international providers connect to this backbone through routers sometimes known as gateways, which are connections that allow disparate networks to communicate with each other. These gateways, just like other routers, may be a point at which Internet traffic is monitored or controlled.
Why This Matters
For the average internet user, these complex processes remain blissfully unseen. We don’t have to understand the tech lingo or internet jargon to find out what movie’s playing tonight at the Shattuck Cinema. But in order to understand how information is censored or filtered on the internet, a discussion of these processes become absolutely necessary because the mechanism that blocks information can act on any step of the internet system.
Consider DNS servers. Originally, this system was created in order to translate between human-readable domain names and IP addresses. However, these servers can also be used as censoring mechanisms by checking requested domain names against an existing “blacklist” and preventing the proper IP address from being returned. This is one way to effectively block access to the requested information from that domain.
Censorship can thus occur at different points in the Internet system, from whole networks, certain ports, individual domains or even specific keywords identified by filtering software. The only way to adequately bypass censorship or create effective policy is to identify the specific censorship techniques that are used.
So how exactly do governments, corporations, and other information-wary actors work to limit information traveling across the information super highway? Visit my IP address next week for more.
The New Techno-University in an Age of Unemployment
For as long as we’ve had universities, it appears we’ve had crises of universities. And perhaps now more than ever, it seems that the death of the university (as we currently know it) is just around the corner. Regardless of the stated intent of universities to produce good citizens with a critical eye towards extant social relations, it now appears that universities are serving to reproduce social privilege instead of providing a level playing field. With nearly every university feeling the resource crunch – and social sciences and humanities at public institutions suffering the most –higher education is increasingly geared towards neoliberal paradigms, employability, and a functional relationship with learning. The university has come into question, both within and without.
What is to be done? – The question on everyone’s mind. It seems clear enough what kind of University we don’t want, but there has been much less elaboration about the university we are for, that which we should promote and to which we should be committed.
This challenge provides the impetus for the discussion series facilitated by the University of California Humanities Research Institute entitled “The University We Are For”. Recently, the institute took this discussion to the digital realm, asking what “The (Technological) University We Could Be For”:
There has been considerable discussion about long-distance learning, but other technological impacts have been arguably more far-reaching and profound. This distinguished panel will lead a discussion of "the university we are for," focusing especially on the impacts new technologies are having on pedagogy and institutional structure, on research and engagement in and across the academy.
The entire discussion is available online. And with so much buzz surrounding the seemingly-infinite potential of new technologies on education, it was refreshing to hear a debate over the solid possibilities and limitations that the digital era can bring to the university.
Johanna Drucker, for example, painted us a vivid picture of a “university in the age of delightenment”: where digital archives and avatars worked seamlessly with real bodies and minds to produce truly cumulative knowledge. Geof Bowker highlighted contemporary projects that were paving the way for a new model of learning. New modes of communication – such as commutable document formats or crowdsourcing collaboration - allow for interactive formats, databases and communication above and beyond the written word. Within these visions, the university doesn’t stop within the walls of the “brick and mortar” institution but continues throughout society as well as throughout the lives of the students.
For all the panelists, technology represents not simply a set of novel tools for classroom but a space in which to rethink the entire structure of the university. As Nishat Shah assertively put it, we have not yet exhausted the possibilities of different forms of the university because we continue to commit ourselves to its material structure. This structure determines everything from the established teacher/student relationship, the separation of disciplines, and the standards for university prestige. It is responsible, according to Bowker, for the pressure scholars feel to pump out as many articles as they can instead of engaging in larger and more collaborative projects that extend beyond the life of the author. It is responsible, according to Nashat, for the pernicious practice of university admissions that equates an institution’s prestige with how many people they keep out. It is responsible, according to Beth Coleman, for the unequal status between students taking online courses and those who often pay more for a face-to-face classroom experience.
“Radical” proposals involving new technology are not really radical at all because they keep within the existing structure. The most visible manifestation of this is what Christpher Newfield calls “middle-brow tech”: bad powerpoints and mediocre classroom web platforms that embrace new technologies in the most banal and complacent way possible. For all the panelists, there was a consensus that new technologies must inspire us to radically rethink the current landscape of higher education in order to build the “Innovative University.” The university of the future (a Harvard-for-the-100-percent) will continue to serve as a political space for knowledge production, dissemination, distribution, acquisition, assessment and accreditation. But it will utilize technology to provide education that is both mass and at the highest quality, a truly “open” university striving towards a democratization of capability and lifelong learning.
Something struck me in this panel: even though the tenor of these lectures were utopian in their future-oriented visions, a kind of nostalgia was present during the panel discussion. It seemed that all the panelists yearned for a time when students eschewed the functionalist motivation for learning and wanted to learn for learning’s sake. In fact, most of the discussion centered around how the new university can counteract the current consumerist model of education in which students pick and choose their subjects based on their marketed, resume-building potential. How can we get students to love learning again, and not just see it as a way to acquire skills in order to do something else?
The conversation struck me as odd, considering that there was no undergraduate student on the panel (and seemingly none in the audience). While the panel featured an in-depth discussion of the fiscal crunch faced by Universities, there was hardly any mention of how current economic pressures affect undergraduate and graduate students facing a scary and mercurial job market.
As an illustrative anecdote: When I graduated from the University of Chicago in 2008, very few of my friends enjoyed full-time employment. Most of them were jobless, or else working minimum wage as restaurant servers, coffee shops baristas, or data entry pods. According to official University data, only 55% of my class had a job a year after graduation. Another 20% went to graduate or professional school; I suspect many were enticed by the opportunity to delay the disheartening job-search process for another few years. But perhaps more telling than the numbers was the level of anxiety and unadulterated fear that settled around us like an unrelenting black fog.
It’s a national struggle, and prospects look worse for students in the humanities. According to Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, recent college graduates with bachelor’s degrees in the arts, humanities and architecture experienced significantly higher rates of joblessness. Even if the numbers of youth unemployment are going down, the feelings of job anxiety among university students will surely be far lasting.
While discussions like the one organized by UCHRI are desperately needed, we should keep the aforementioned dynamics in mind. As one panelist claimed, the new university will be guided by a concept of learning and work “as something pleasurable, enjoyable and engaging and not something to just maintain one’s lifestyle.” Fair enough. But for me, one thing is clear: the years of the “dream job” – employment that embodies one’s passion, is intensely pleasurable and puts food on the table – is over. Or at least significantly delayed until the Baby Boomers retire. The new university, grounded in new technologies and radical restructurings – should embrace a model of learning that is valued in itself but also complementary to solutions to real-life economic constraints and pressures.
The Year in Digital Humanities
2011 was a year of enormous change in computing, technology, and online. In honor of the New Year, I present the most notable stories in technology from 2011 (and what it means for scholars in the Humanities). See you in 2012!
1. Berkeley Students, Staff, and Faculty Get Free Stuff
In 2011, Operational Excellence sponsored a Productivity Suite project that included campus-wide distributions of Adobe software, Microsoft Office, and (soon) Google Email and Calendar Solutions.
What This Means for Digital Humanists: If you’re part of the Berkeley community, you just received thousands of dollars worth of software for free. The lesson here is to never, ever ignore emails from Operational Excellence.
2. Political Discourse Gets Meme-d
Memes are ideas on the internet that go viral. The editors of Know Your Meme, a Web site dedicated to tracking this sort of thing, singled out two of their favorites: Rebecca Black’s so-bad-its-kinda-good YouTube video “Friday,” and the remixed images of a police officer spraying UC protestors. Never to be outshined, Facebook has its own catalogue of what people were talking about in 2011. The Death of Osama bin Laden was number one, followed by Packers win the Super Bowl. An eclectic mix, indeed.
What it Means for Digital Humanists: Memes are one of the most important facets of internet archiving. Plus our very own director Celeste Langan starred in one particularly important meme – demonstrating (very close to home) what happens when videos go viral.
3. Intellectual Property Trump Civil Liberties
In terms of online freedoms, SOPA made headlines, but 2011 saw a trend of legislatures — Democrats and Republicans alike — turned a blind eye to important civil liberties issues, including Patriot Act reform, and instead paid heed to the content industry’s desires to stop piracy.
What it means for Digital Humanists: To the extent that digital humanists care about privacy and access to information, this is a pretty big deal.
4. Secret Tech Suddenly Not So Secret Anymore.
We all know we wouldn’t have the internet if it wasn’t for the military (and the pornography industry), but 2011 demonstrated quite viscerally the link between technology and warfare.
Israel used a computer worm to sabotage Iran’s nuclear development. Drones used extensively in various combat missions (including the death of Osama Bin Laden). The hacker group Anonymous continued their online mayhem targeting everyone from the Tunisian government to BART personnel.
Even the US government is not safe from cyber warfare. In the past two months alone we've seen attacks against the US Chamber of Commerce, Landsat-7 and Terra-AM1 satellites, various chemical companies, and more. A report called Foreign Spies Stealing US Economic Secrets in Cyberspace published by the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive this October accused Chinese hackers of being "the world's most active and and persistent perpetrators of economic espionage."
What It Means for Digital Humanists: Expect more delays on BART.
5. The Rise of the Tablet.
The trickle of tablets began in 2010 with the iPad and the Galaxy Tab, but in 2011 the floodgates opened. Get yours for as low as $99.
What It Means for Digital Humanists: A book I downloaded on Amazon says the rise of tablets signal one more nail in the coffin for real live book stores. By the way - What’s a book store?
6. It's All Mobile
The mobile web is growing faster than the desktop one, and becoming the focus of technology innovation. Taken together, 2010 and 2011 have been the years of fastest growth ever in the smartphone market, at 72% and 50% respectively.
What It Means for Digital Humanists: The growth of the mobile market goes hand-in-hand with more and better apps, higher quality cell phone cameras, and internet connectivity for millions of people around the world. If anything, fieldwork is not what it used to be.
7. The Death of Flash and the Rise of HTML5
If you have an ipad, you’re probably wondering what Flash is. Apple doesn’t support Flash, nor does BlackBerry or Windows Phone 7. Flash was necessary once, but that was then, and HTML5 is now – or at least will be in 2012. Even Adobe has given in, saying, "HTML5 is now universally supported on major mobile devices, in some cases exclusively. This makes HTML5 the best solution for creating and deploying content in the browser across mobile platforms. We are excited about this." Can't you just hear the joy in their voice?
What It Means for Digital Humanists: Pretty soon, you will no longer have to deal with that annoying, broken lego icon. In the long run, the rise of HTML5 may have profound implications on how we interact with online spaces, including the development of Web 3.0.
8. The Death of Steve Jobs
Love him or hate him, Steve Jobs had an enormous impact on our lives. He will be missed. Before he left us, Jobs made one last appearance on the Apple keynote stage to introduce iCloud, which he called the culmination of a ten-year journey to "get rid of the file system."
What It Means for Digital Humanists: Someday, you will have a clean desktop (both wood and digital).