Material Culture in an Increasingly Digital World
Hope Elizabeth Gillespie
Citation: Gillespie, Hope Elizabeth. “Material Culture in an Increasingly Digital World.” The Coalition of Master’s Scholars on Material Culture, April 9, 2021.
I’ll admit, Zoom meetings still make me nervous. Am I muted? Can they hear my little brother playing Fortnite in the room next to me? Do they know that I’m not wearing real pants? When Sydney, MaryKate, and I started to think about what the theme of our next symposium would be, we found it in our “new normal”- the reality of our increasingly digital world.
2020 was a hard year for everyone, but in particular for those who handle things - objects, manuscripts, artifacts, material culture. How do we interact with objects that we can’t touch or even see in person? It is estimated that in 2020 nearly 33% of museums were in danger of closing their doors for good.[1] How are we meant to access our subjects of study if museums, archives, and even travel in general is not only temporarily limited, but also potentially permanently extinguished? How can we study material culture when we can’t even interact with one another?
Obviously, this was a discussion that the broader community of material culture specialists- archaeologists, curators, historians, archivists, artists, etc.- needed to have: How do we cope with this loss of tangibility? And miraculously, we did. Webinars were scheduled, virtual tours and exhibits were created, and 3D imaging and digital archives were expanded. We set up online communities for research, networking, and discussion.
Our own organization was built in this age of Zoom and Google Meets- most of our team are people we’ve never met in person. And yet, this team of strangers spread across two continents has managed to publish nearly 30 authors, organize two symposiums and multiple networking events, and create a community for others to vent their frustrations, ask for help, and make connections to further their careers. Our success, to me, is astounding, not in the least because this was all done through the screens, keyboards, and headphones.
This digitization process- which has been slowly happening but was forced to accelerate- made us ask ourselves a very important question: Can you ever really know an object, or even more intimately, a person, without touching or seeing them in reality? In a way, it feels like a return to the days of armchair anthropology, a way of talking and writing about things we’ve never experienced in person. Listening to a podcast about Normandy is one thing; actually being on that beach is quite another. In my own experience, prior to this year, I would never have considered that any research not grounded in hand-ons experience of a place or an object could be thoroughly done.
And yet, I can not ignore the fact that this change to complete digitization makes knowledge more accessible than it's ever been. The sheer amount of methodology that has been created in the past year to overcome the obstacles of time, distance, and disease has given us so many opportunities to connect with new people, attend seminars, experience digital exhibitions, and truly create historical narratives that are open and accessible to the public. The absolute consumption of knowledge and production of research in this moment is astounding- and to say that it isn’t thorough or well-grounded because it can not be physically based, may, in fact, be very wrong.
So what is the fate of material culture in this new digital age? People much smarter than me are unable to answer that question- mostly, because I think it’s an insolent question. The question we should ask ourselves, and the overarching principle that we should be celebrating, is how much further can human ingenuity and connectivity go? In my opinion, digitization is not the end of material culture, but rather the next step in the ever amazing perseverance of human beings to mold and adapt to the world around them.
Please join us on Saturday, April 10, 2021 at 10 am EDT for our Spring Symposium, Material Culture in an Increasingly Digital World, as we continue these vital conversations.
Endnotes
1. Elizabeth Merritt, “Crowdsourcing a Database of Permanent Museum Closings,” American Alliance of Museums, January 8, 2021, https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/08/crowdsourcing-a-database-of-permanent-museum-closings/.
Bibliography
Merritt, Elizabeth. “Crowdsourcing a Database of Permanent Museum Closings.” American Alliance of Museums, January 8, 2021.
https://www.aam-us.org/2021/01/08/crowdsourcing-a-database-of-permanent-museum-closings/.