After reading my recent piece on Wikipedia in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Dr. Bruce Cole, Chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities, called me and emailed me and chatted with me about my vision of how one must teach the humanistic and social implications of the technology in which our students and we (whether we like it or not) are immersed. He invited me to come to NEH to talk to senior officers there and divisional heads to discuss this expanded view of technology. I'm going on Monday and look forward to it very much and am honored by the invitation.

But in thinking about the remarks I will make, I realize that the formulation that David Theo Goldberg and I came up with several years ago, in our piece for the Chronicle of Higher Education that marked the early stages of HASTAC ("A Manifesto for the Humanities in an Age of Technology") is now outdated. This IS an age of great and important humanistic questions---if only humanists will claim them.

Here are some points I will make. Here is my preliminary Manifesto for Technology in an Age of Humanism. First, the goal of the humanities is to think through what it means to be human. That is a "universal" question with many specific local and ontological meanings and applications that need to be thought through in all ways, from the philosophical, aesthetic, spiritual, linguistic, political, and cultural to the neuroscientific, biological,demographic, and environmental. THAT is Big Picture Humanities. Some of those things are not humanistic and some social science and some scientific. It is all about what it means to be human and only humanists have the training and expertise to take all of the differentiated and sometimes radically segmented and even segregated knowledge components to combine them into large insights that do not lose sight of the local and specific and historical determinants of those insights. It would be great if all the funding agencies worked together to contribute to a "Big Picture" fund that required scholars (including students) to work together on one project.

Here's an example: "Mind and Brain [Thinking] in an Era of Culture" would be a wonderful cross-domain big humanistic question. A first step would be a cross-domain repository, searchable and interoperable, of research in all relevant areas---if it were half as good a search tool as "Kayak" (an aggregator which allows one to search results in all travel sites simultaneously) we would have an enormous humanistic contribution enhanced by technology. And it might put us past some of the truly foolish conclusions and generalizations coming out of brilliant and precise experiments if it were easy to access results in ancillary fields.

A second point I will make about our age is that it is the age of puny debate. Yap yap yap yap. I'm sick of it. We got rid of Imus, let's get rid of the rest, on television, in editorials, in the snarky blogosphere, in academe. Debate is great. Pro-and-con shoot-em-up is ridiculous. It is a degradation of serious thought that reduces everything to the lowest common denominator, reduces insight to quip and insult. Humanists have been branded as the "contentious" ones in this age, but that label itself is part of snarky culture. That's a shame. I am opting out of the whole pro-and-con format. It's just not interesting. And too much of humanities discourse is trapped in that mode, even as we are critical of media versions of that mode. It is too much the cliche of humanist argumentation to begin by critiquing someone else. But all that does is lets someone else define the ground from which one speaks. Why are we training our students in such a paltry and minor key? Why the defensive posture (i.e. I'm not doing x or y, instead of I am doing a, b, and c.)

In fact, scientists and social scientists get into debates too but the so-called "Culture Wars" have been fought on our ground and our bodies litter the field. I'm tired of it. And I'm mad at it. I have bigger battles than squabbling either (a) with fellow intellectuals trying to understand our age--no matter what the field or the politics (b) or with groups external to the university who are well-financed and want to spend their time condemning us. Let them! I just don't to be diverted.

Our HASTAC mission is to understand what it means to be human in the present moment and to work collaboratively with others who share this goal to come up with the most complex and interesting and engaged answers (hardly stable or final ones) that help make our students more informed and astute students of a complex world.

Where does technology fit in? Not to sound like a broken record, but it is the HASTAC credo to be prosumers, consumers and producers. Customizers (all hail, Web 2.0). To develop and apply new technologies to education, life and society, while also thinking critically, culturally, and historically about the meaning of new technologies in learning, life, and society.

There is so much to do, so little time. We need all the help we can get, and, most of all, we need technologists to work together with humanists because, as in all great ages of science, we live in an Age of Humanism.