Mitchell Pace
With the dawn of our digital age, we have been able to do so much; whether it be looking up facts or sending links or emails to multitudes of people. It is easier than ever to spread information and learn from and/or about any culture. It is incredible to think about how through various symbols and alphabets, we can gorge on information from anywhere, sitting at a computer or on a phone or television.
Through this stream of information, we reach out faster and broader than ever before, allowing more cultural awareness and acceptance. We know more about each other despite the distance and language barriers that has made the spread of knowledge a much more daunting and difficult task. As James Gleick points out in “The Information,” technology has changed drastically over the times. What would be used to send signals or just communicate in one’s culture could be completely different from another culture or even how they were in the past. Gleick describes the use of drums in sub-Saharan Africa as a prime example of a culture’s unique form of communication, stating, “While only some people learned to communicate by drum, almost anyone could understand the messages in the drumbeats. Some people drummed rapidly and some slowly. Set phrases would recur again and again, virtually unchanged, yet different drummers would send the same message with different wording.” (15). Gleick also touches on how Europeans would be caught off guard by this form of communication until they were able to figure it out. There was a lot of hard work put into understanding the patterns and messages, but what is even more amazing is that we can now just sit at home and google the drum messaging system to learn more about it and have a better understanding of the culture. Where before, getting to understand people of different cultures was immensely difficult, like with sub-Saharan Africa, through digital technology, it is as easy as the push of a button. Digital humanities has allowed an easier understanding of cultures throughout human history and allows us to sit at home and learn and educate others through the sending of a link or just keep reading up on others, allowing a better understanding.