Navigating the Digital Turn: The Enduring Mission of the Humanities in an Age of Technogenesis

A Critical Juncture for the Humanities

I’d like to dive into a question that a lot of people quietly worry about but rarely say out loud: in a world saturated with screens, feeds, and algorithms, do the humanities still matter? Or are they just a nostalgic relic from a slower age?

I want to argue that not only do the humanities still matter, they may be more essential now than at any point in modern history. But to see why, we have to zoom out and look at the bigger picture of what’s actually happening to us as humans in this digital environment.

Let’s start with a simple but unsettling idea: we invent things, and those things, in turn, invent us.

Think about your phone for a moment. It’s not just a tool you use. Over time, it has trained your habits, your reflexes, maybe even your expectations of what counts as “normal” attention. You reach for it in quiet moments. You check it when you’re anxious. It shapes what you see, when you see it, and often how you feel about it.

This mutual shaping of humans and technology is what N. Katherine Hayles, building on Bernard Stiegler, calls technogenesis. It’s not a new process. Humans have always evolved alongside their tools.

But what’s different now is the speed and intensity. The feedback loops between us and our technologies have tightened. We build systems, those systems reshape our behavior, and that new behavior feeds back into the next generation of systems. The loop accelerates.

And that acceleration is doing something to our minds.

Hayles talks about a shift between two cognitive modes: deep attention and hyper attention.

Deep attention is what you use when you sit with a difficult novel, wrestle with a dense argument, or stay with a problem for hours. It’s patient. It tolerates boredom and frustration. It digs in.

Hyper attention, on the other hand, is tuned for speed and scanning. It jumps quickly between streams of information. It prefers frequent rewards. It’s great at picking up patterns across lots of incoming signals, but it doesn’t sit still for long.

Now, the key point is not that one mode is good and the other is bad. We actually need both. Hyper attention helps us navigate the firehose of information we face every day. But our current digital environment is not neutral. It systemically privileges hyper attention. The platforms, notifications, and interfaces we live inside of are all designed to reward rapid shifts, quick hits, and constant stimulation.

Over time, that environment doesn’t just influence what we do. It reshapes how our brains are wired, especially for people who have grown up entirely in this digital ecosystem. The result is a cognitive bias toward quick scanning and away from sustained focus.

And that brings us to agency.

We like to imagine ourselves as fully independent individuals making free choices from the inside out. That’s the classic liberal humanist picture: a person with autonomy, self-determination, and full control over their actions.

But look around. Our decisions are constantly being nudged by recommendation systems, by financial infrastructures, by invisible protocols and defaults. Bruno Latour and others have argued that agency today is distributed—spread across humans and non-human systems. Your “choice” is often co-authored by code, platforms, and networks.

That doesn’t mean we’re puppets with no say. It does mean that the old story of the isolated, sovereign subject is no longer adequate. We act, but we act with and through systems that shape what even shows up as a choice.

So here we are: our cognition is shifting, our agency is entangled with technological infrastructures, and our tools are evolving along with us in tight, accelerating loops.

Where do the humanities fit into this picture?

For some, this whole landscape feels like a threat. If digital tools can analyze huge bodies of text, if code and data become central skills, then what happens to the long, careful training that humanists have historically invested in—close reading, interpretive nuance, deep historical context?

It’s understandable that some scholars see Digital Humanities as a kind of hostile takeover. They’ve spent years honing interpretive craft, and now it can seem as if those skills are being pushed aside in favor of programming languages and dashboards.

But that reading of the situation misses something crucial.

Hayles insists that the core questions of the humanities—questions of meaning—still have a “salient position”. And if anything, they matter more in a world where algorithms and infrastructures quietly shape our lives.

We can build incredibly powerful systems, but we still have to ask: What do these systems mean for how we live? For power? For justice? For identity? For what we take to be real or true?

Those are not engineering questions. Those are humanistic questions.

So the real challenge isn’t “How do the humanities survive?” It’s “How do the humanities evolve while staying true to their central mission?”

On the research side, one of the most intriguing developments is the rise of machine reading. Instead of reading a handful of novels in depth, we can now use computational tools to scan and analyze thousands or even millions of texts—archives far too large for a single human to process.

But here’s the important part: machine reading doesn’t replace close reading. It extends it.

Hayles gives an example discussed by Holger Pötzsch: researchers Sönke Neitzel and Harald Welzer had access to an enormous archive of secretly recorded conversations among German prisoners of war during World War II. The dataset was so vast that traditional methods alone couldn’t handle it. By using digital tools—topic clustering, keyword analysis—they were able to map and structure that archive, making it tractable for human interpretation.

The machines helped chart the territory. The humans still had to walk it, listen closely, and make sense of what they found.

That’s the pattern: use digital tools to open new vistas, then bring humanistic judgment to bear on what those tools reveal.

Now, what about the classroom?

If our students are already living in an environment of hyper attention, then simply insisting on the old one-to-many lecture model isn’t going to cut it. It’s not that lectures are useless. It’s that they’re often misaligned with how students now experience information and participate in knowledge.

Digital tools give us a chance to rethink the classroom as a more interactive space.

Imagine a flipped classroom, where the basic content is moved out of the live session and into readings, videos, or interactive modules that students engage with on their own time. Then class time becomes a workshop: a place for discussion, collaborative analysis, and creative projects that use digital media.

Or think about collaborative writing on networked platforms, where students don’t just hand in isolated essays but build shared documents, annotation layers, and multimodal projects. Their existing literacies—the way they already write, remix, and respond online—can become assets rather than distractions.

To help bridge the perceived gap between “traditional” and “digital” work, Hayles proposes the idea of comparative textual media. The key move here is simple but powerful: recognize that the printed book is one medium among many. It has its own material properties and affordances, just like a manuscript or a digital file.

Once you see that, the conversation stops being, “Is digital killing print?” and becomes, “What can each medium do? What are its strengths, its limits, its blind spots?” That shift in framing dissolves the antagonism and invites comparative, experimental work.

Through all of this, though, one responsibility of the humanities stands out as absolutely central, maybe even non-negotiable: cultivating deep attention.

In a world where almost everything around us is training us to skim, swipe, and move on, the humanities are one of the few places where we still practice the skill of staying with something—an argument, a text, a film, a piece of music—long enough for it to transform us.

Deep attention is not just a niche academic preference. It’s a universal skill. It underpins serious work in science and social science just as much as in literature or philosophy. It’s what allows a researcher to follow a complex chain of reasoning. It’s what allows a designer to iterate thoughtfully rather than chase every new trend.

So when the humanities insist on teaching deep attention, they’re not clinging to the past. They’re offering a counterweight to the cognitive effects of technogenesis. They’re saying: yes, hyper attention has its place. But without spaces that deliberately cultivate sustained focus, we lose something fundamental to advanced thought in every domain.

Put all of this together and a clear picture emerges.

The digital turn is not a death sentence for the humanities. It’s a stress test, a forcing function, and an invitation.

By embracing methods like machine reading, reimagining the classroom with digital tools, and reframing media through comparative textual analysis, the humanities can fully enter the technological present without abandoning their core mission. And by explicitly committing to the cultivation of deep attention, they position themselves as a crucial ally in navigating the cognitive and social consequences of our own inventions.

We are not just dealing with faster computers and bigger datasets. We are dealing with a transformation in how we think, how we act, and how our agency is distributed across the systems we’ve built.

In that environment, the humanities are not a luxury. They’re a guidance system.

They help us ask: What kind of humans are we becoming alongside our technologies? What do we value in this new landscape? What does it mean to live well when your mind is constantly entangled with machines?

Those aren’t questions an algorithm can answer for us. They’re questions we have to wrestle with together.

And that, more than anything, is why the humanities still matter.

And why, in this age of technogenesis, we may need them more than ever.