Despite the fact that our physical liberal arts community remains a fundamentally analog enterprise, a holdout (or an experiment) in the now often-devalued notions of living and learning together, technology has become an increasingly large part of our everyday lives here at Wesleyan. I am typing this article on my computer in Usdan right now, and though I have avoided it in the past, I have begun bringing this computer with me everywhere in hopes that, should I find myself with some free time, I can work on my thesis.

I hope (but doubt), that I could be saying the same about the many people I’ve seen enraptured with their laptops in class over the years. While computers have the potential to greatly expand our learning experience, the main justification for having them in class most of the time, in the humanities, seems to be convenience. We have much more information at our fingertips if we bring our computers; it’s easy to correct the professor or look up on Wikipedia some name we’ve forgotten. Yes, the Internet is good for finding out factual information. But what if we’re not mentally present in class while the professor works hard to impart something to us? That’s the anxiety of every humanities teacher, and they are often found positing policies against computer use in class on the first day.

For better or worse, though, computers are breaking down boundaries on our campus. The Internet can bring unexpected human voices into the classroom, from great scholars to friends on Facebook chat. Meanwhile, Coursera, with which Wesleyan recently announced a partnership, brings some of the benefits of liberal arts education to a wider audience for free. And of course, it’s now possible to write a well-revised final paper on an airplane, in a café, or anywhere else you can bring a laptop. Even without an Internet connection, it is possible to download your materials and take them with you wherever you go.

Such flexibility might lead some humanities students to question why we remain on this campus together, while taking such great financial pains, at all. Most of us don’t remember the era before Blackboard and Moodle, when every assignment had to be printed out and dropped in a physical box somewhere by a certain time. When we got a taste of that luddism last year (Snoctober) some of us rejoiced inwardly as we re-realized the unique form of community that exists on a college campus. I will quote Professor Karamcheti as I did last year—“grading papers by candlelight, I really thought, we don’t need very much, do we?”

This is a subject, however, about which we humanities students might be able to learn from the sciences. And it is a subject of which I admittedly have little knowledge. I do know, however, that technology is essential to the teaching and research methods of many of the sciences, from making calculations to modeling natural phenomena to the principle of coding itself. (How did programming language end up getting called a scientific discipline, anyway?) How can we make technology crucial to the humanities, rather than just a provider of endless distractions and faster research tools?

Going back to the idea of technology bringing a multitude of voices into the classroom, there are a variety of projects in the humanities that crowdsource to variously integral extents. There are projects like book scanning and finding Mars rocks on research sites, for which even the most self-educated Internet users have a surprising degree of enthusiasm. It seems that if we enlist the outsiders that inhabit the Internet in the project of research—as has already been done with Wikipedia—there is some kind of fundamental barrier that is broken down between elites and non-elites, those with degrees and the know-nothings. Professors naturally find this threatening, especially in a world in which it is increasingly difficult to get due credit and pay for humanities-related endeavors. Eventually, a new hierarchy will probably rise from the ashes of the teacher/student divide, for better and for worse. It is up to the ingenuity of the academy to find a way to make this hierarchy not so arbitrary.