Return to the Valley of the Dolls

Abstract

Several years ago, I wrote a paper on some of the general problems for humanists associated with the use of technology in teaching and scholarship. The paper contained a fantasy about a next-century scholar who was able to write a major multimedia monograph on that great literary artist, Jacqueline Susann. I will not subject those of you who escaped that paper to a complete rendition of the fantasy. Through hyperbole it attempted to establish that scholars of the future will have access to amounts and kinds of information of which we can only dream, and that such access will make possible a kind of scholarship and teaching that is quite difficult, if not impossible, to accomplish at present. The title of this paper derives from that other essay, which imagined what sort of work might be done on Susann in the future and how such works of literary genius might be assessed by a technologized, poststructural critique of the genre of popular fiction that she helped to initiate. The title of the resulting imagined monograph was Valley of the Trash: Jacqueline Susann and the Semiotics of Mediocrity in Late Twentieth-Century American Literature. I thought myself rather clever for using an example combining both the power of emerging technologies and important trends in humanistic scholarship and teaching. My intention was only partially satirical, for it seemed to me then-as now-that scholarship in the humanities has significantly broadened and deepened in both method and sources and that this expansion of the ambit of scholarly work is remarkably well-suited to the power the new technologies offer. Name your discipline-social history, literary criticism, art history, philosophy, area studies of any kind-and I think you will agree that what scholars are now doing matches beautifully the capacities of electronic technology to locate information, access it, and analyze it. The paper was actually quite prescient, if I do say so myself, since it predicted that technologies we now associate with the World Wide Web would soon make images, sound, and full-motion video available to anyone with a desktop computer of reasonable power. Three years later that technology is exploding, and we are only at the beginning! So I can feel quite smug and proud of myself. However, I have also come to recognize that my naivete about the economic context of technological change was much more impressive than my prediction of universal access to the diaries and library check-out cards of Jacqueline Susann. I understood then that technology is not free. In that paper and in a series of essays on similar subjects I emphasized that the financial resources required both to put such technology on the professorial desktop and to create the electronic information to which it would provide access were not trivial. I worried aloud a good deal about where the dollars would be found. Now, with the National Endowment for the Humanities on the block and public support for higher education dwindling, I am a good deal more concerned. Technologist friends had assured me that there was nothing to worry about, that everything would soon be so cheap that we would be foolish to be concerned about a phenomenon-the high cost of technology and electronic information-that was likely to be transitory in any case. While I did not accept this argument entirely, it did seem to me that the history of technology indicated that consumer technologies tend to decline in price until they are either replaced or disappear.