In class we have been presented with the idea that society is currently undergoing a digital renaissance. Just as artists, writers, and philosophers in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries found room to create new movements, so can we in our day as benefactors and users of the internet.
Although there are fundamental differences between the European Renaissance and the current digital renaissance, Shakespeare’s writing evidenced the first in the same way that bloggers’ writing evidences the second because of the humanist value of both.
Comparing the European Renaissance of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and what can be called a digital renaissance in the twenty-first century is an easy task. At the European Renaissance, printing was creating a new vehicle for communication: more people were literate, circulation improved, and social climate engendered much content worth writing about. In the twenty-first century, online publication has radically changed social life: the youngest generation is completely computer literate; nearly anyone can access the internet; and as each individual finds its voice, online mediums explode with content. In both cases, there is a marked movement toward greater linguistic expansion and expression. Not only is there a significant shift in medium, but members of each renaissance have both had a fluctuated language to shape and mold. Shakespeare coined the words “laughable” and “critic” just as prominent bloggers coined the phrases “blogspeak” and “blogosphere.”
Some oppose such a comparison between Shakespeare and bloggers, for one of the most important factors in writing is audience, and scholars see that “in obvious ways and for obvious reasons,” when taking our two proposed writers into view, Shakespeare and the blogger, “there was far more cultural homogeneity, and [Shakespeare] was much more in harmony with the relatively uniform outlook of his audience than modern writers are likely to be with their heterogeneous public” (Kelly 57-59). The very nature of society has changed from the fifteenth to the twenty-first century.
But it is this very situation, with the complexities introduced by the two differing audiences, provide the fodder for a discussion rich with comparable ideas. The use of “renaissance,” as an idea, presents a societal mode of thought with a specific cultural connotation, imbedded in Western students from the beginning of their formal schooling, and is therefore useful. The value of the humanists in the European Renaissance, Shakespeare included, was that they “exerted themselves to achieve a synthesis [of culture] in a spirit of the purest and noblest idealism,” or, that they synthesized components of social atmosphere in order to make their teachings applicable (Dresden 38). Surely bloggers, as humanists today, do the same: they synthesize word, picture, video, etc. to create a representative presentation. The ability to do this, to summarize and represent in text, is one valued in society and inherent in the humanist tradition.
Developing the Argument:
Contextualizing the Idea of Humanism across Renaissance
Cross-Medium Examples: Shakespeare and Our Digital World
What Does This Mean For Us?
The parallels drawn between the texts of Shakespeare and blogs, divulge the constant and needful humanist “search” that is present in times of the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries; thankfully, blogging, in many ways, purifies and advances the utility of humanism in a way that Shakespearean texts never will be able to.
There is a promising future for blogging in taking up and continuing the humanist legacy Shakespeare left in his work. One of the major critics of the Renaissance was that “humanism… [was] too deeply involved with the world of fantasy and art,” for, “in art the idea is too closely connected with the concerete, the sensuous, so that it appears merely as an ‘ideal’,” and instead, truth’s true source is “authority, the heart, the instincts, the inclinations, our natural being, a sense of justice… The content is the form, which is merely a natural one” (Grassi 3). While the formality of Shakespeare’s works, imbedded by the close study of the classics, helped to give authority to and canonize humanist work in the Renaissance, there is weight in the argument that humanism is taken further as a “search” as it comes closer to that “naturalness” which is so key to it. Advancing the significance of the parallels made between Shakespeare and blogging, the latter produces a rawer and purer representation as a medium for human expression, taking some of the “art” out of the communication.
As the digital renaissance of the twenty-first century continues to develop, it will produce its own contributions to the value of the individual, through humanism and through other means. So far as writers continue the tradition of the “search” for value in their societies, the nature of “humanism” and “renaissances” will continue to develop, just as society and its self-reflection will.
In many ways, blogging, along with other online communications characteristic of this digital renaissance, will bring humanism to a purer, more "natural" level than it has even been on before.