Understanding Digital Culture: Brought to you By...

Before Ishmael starts his journey in Melville’s Moby Dick, he gives a description of an oil painting that he sees in the small hotel that he is staying at. At first, the painting is completely obscure, and he cannot tell what it is supposed to be, but as he studies it and sees each little part individually, the painting starts to make sense.

If this were a traditional literary analysis of this passage of the novel, I would simply say that this passage is a metaphor for reading the novel. The novel doesn’t really make total sense if we just look at it in one glance, but as we dissect each part of it, we start to see how each chapter, each word works together to create the quest of finding the white whale.

But this isn’t a traditional literary analysis. This is an analysis from digital culture point of view. The metaphor for reading Moby Dick becomes a metaphor for studying digital culture. When we apply the method for studying the novel to studying the digital culture that surrounds us, we see the process of digital culture better. As a whole, digital culture seems like a giant, jumbled, ugly mess that would be nearly impossible to navigate, but if we focus on one part at a time, it becomes manageable, meaningful, and even possibly beautiful.

When we do a broader literary analysis of Moby Dick we see things such as how the chapters work together to create the story as a whole. There are chapters when the plot is pushed forward quickly, especially at the end of the novel when the crew of the Pequod is batting the white whale. On the other hand, there are chapters in which hardly anything happens at all, and Ishmael just dumps all of the information that he has gathered together on us. These chapters may not seem important on their own, but they create greater importance for the plot-filled chapters. If we didn’t have all of the knowledge about whales that Ishmael gives us, we wouldn’t know the significance of how they catch the whales, or what they do with their findings.

Understanding this helps us understand the workings of digital culture. Often, people just want the exciting things—the plot filled chapters. But if we don’t gain all of the informational pieces that we need, these excitements won’t have as much meaning or importance for us.

In short, the method of understanding Moby Dick can be used as a way to understand the digital world. This is an idea I’ve mentioned before in posts like this, or that Sam has mentioned in posts like this. But the basics point to how digital culture and traditional literary study can be linked together. Their hand-in-hand study allows for new ideas to come about in new ways that will continue to develop.