How we used Sheldon and the gang to explain complicated concepts (Photo by Michael Yarish/CBS via Getty Images)
In guest editing New Techno Humanities, a journal hosted by a top Chinese university, we invited software practitioners to write short items. The brief was to bridge the theory-practice divide. Unfortunately, those approached felt out of their depth in an academic environment.
So, we tried to recruit working practitioners by mentioning the comic-obsessed The Big Bang Theory sitcom characters in our invitations. In it, Sheldon, a theoretical physicist, and his equally gauche girlfriend Amy, a neuroscientist, had shared the Nobel Prize. Sheldon — borderline crazy — routinely denigrates his friends as “engineers with PhDs”. This pejorative identification of professionals, techies and software creators mimics the real-world hierarchy of value where the phrase “It’s academic!” means that something is deemed irrelevant.
The TV comedy predated the scientific theories and technologies that are emerging within what is called the Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR). The 4IR is a fusion of artificial intelligence, robotics, the Internet of Things, 3D printing, genetic engineering and quantum computing, all requiring new analytical languages and new software.
Writing can be difficult for authors versed in one technical or grammatical language but not others. The digital laboratory, however, is becoming a humanities playground. Just ask any seven-year-old who has grown up with new media. Even four-year-olds talk about their Netflix profiles and get frustrated with DStv which lacks such an identification. Equally irritating for these young media consumers is that DStv does not deliver streaming-on-demand.
Responding to the 4IR moment is herri, an art-based cybermag, published from the Open Africa Institute at the University of Stellenbosch. This interactive online art publication brilliantly bridges the divide between scholarly and popular, visually animating its pages.
Its design draws one in and requires the reader to navigate through its moving images, creating coherence from incoherence. The mag describes itself as “a soundmine of narratives, mythologies, ideologies, statements, ambiguities and ideas”.
herri appeared simultaneously with the Covid-19 lockdown in 2020. Covid provided an unanticipated laboratory for blended, digitally delivered learning in which students move between remote online tuition and traditional face-to-face campus-based teaching.
In the business sector, remote working and flexible hours resulted in unused urban office space, now being converted for residential and other uses. In the industrial sector, which requires hands-on manual labour, there were factory closures, intensified automation and, in parts of Asia, the cruel corralling of workers within factories.
The pandemic disrupted global trade and international supply chains, boosting inflation and creating food shortages. Video conferencing skyrocketed as a result.
Electronic engineers when merged with humanities sensitivity, as was our intention in the New Techno Humanities issue, bring about new conditions. South Africa, however, is often a late and passive actor in adopting new technologies.
For example, our government had stalled digital migration in broadcasting until early 2023 and is sceptical about renewable energy. These global initiatives are delayed by legal conflict, policy inertia, corruption on a breathtaking scale and government incompetence.
Just read Andre de Ruyter’s book on Eskom Truth to Power. His aim was to seize the moment of reconstruction for the common good. But he did so in a decaying national environment that for political reasons cannot supply regular electricity (or water) to power the 4IR. Having exposed the truth, De Ruyter barely survived an assassination attempt aimed at retaining organised crime as South Africa’s key industry.
Characteristic of the second and third Industrial Revolutions were transformations of the labour process via automation. Mass distribution of consumer products became possible. Yet South Africa’s development periodisation is a scrambled one. Our digitally connected economy is impeded by a frightening process of state-induced de-industrialisation with associated job losses, loss of investment and drop in tax revenues.
Looting of state coffers, with attendant structural deepening of the gulf between richer and poorer regions, is now the norm. Even in well-served economies, as Wits’s Ian Moll says, the 4IR has delivered few socially positive changes. This is especially so in South Africa where 35% plus structural unemployment prevails.
These negative conditions are those that the World Bank’s 4IR imperative invites emerging economies to leapfrog. In the early 1990s, for example, South Africa’s email network was far more sophisticated than anywhere else. Email had been introduced by local universities to compensate for dysfunctional state-owned telecommunication and postal systems.
So, what’s new? The Post Office is failing and Telkom is popularly known as Helkom. In contrast, with privatisation after 1994, cellphone firms soon dominated both urban and rural areas, including the wealthy and poverty-stricken, notwithstanding high data costs, and the technology underpinned online tuition during the lockdowns.
Where state policies and practices fail, capital, business and communities of interest, such as universities, often fill the gap and make things possible.
Eskom’s failure created market opportunities for solar and wind power, though the government prefers all of us to remain in the polluting coal-fired dark ages. That way it can keep control of the decaying means of production and its citizens dependent on a bankrupt state.
These negativities are reasons why we need leaps in positive imagination. How do we escape the regressive imaginations of the past and rather find our way to the future?
For Moll, the 4IR is primarily constituted as prototype “thought experiments”. This is exactly the way that herri and the school-oriented online educational magazine Beyond Imagining present their content, in the form of partially interactive colourful info bytes. The school magazine claims to “pre-imagine” the future. As with herri, it calls for a reinvention of South Africa’s role on the global stage, despite structural failure.
The channelling of the thought experiments, that is, of the internet as an interacting organism populated by an invisible layer of information surrounding the earth, was first conceptualised during the early 20th century by French Jesuit theologian Teilhard de Chardin and Russian-Ukrainian biogeochemist Vladimir Vernadsky as the “noosphere”.
The noosphere is the sum-total of mental activity that appears from the biosphere. Banished to China by the Catholic Church, the errant priest’s study during the 1920s of sixth-century Confucian thought was germinal. In 1970, his idea of the noosphere was elaborated on by newspaper film critic Gene Youngblood whose “expanded cinema” theories of (analogue) postmodern media heralded the electronically expanded promises of the digital age to come.
Beyond Imagining, Issue 2. Imagine the noosphere in this cover, the internet, the film of information surrounding the earth,
But the very long history of convergence is often forgotten by contemporary scholars as new simultaneous developments in technology conceal the dynamics of historical innovation. Sheldon’s intellectual heroes are the real-life Stephen Hawkings (who features on the show) and Professor Proton, a comedian (Bob Newhart) pretending to be a scientist befuddled by Sheldon’s antics.
The sitcom reminds lay viewers of the history of science. Academia thus perhaps best functions between science and comedy in what is now known as “edutainment” as occurred during the HIV pandemic, in shows such as Soul City, Intersexions, Tsha tsha and Yizo Yizo flighted on SABC TV. New narratives arise out of these kinds of audience research led projects.
The 4IR has become an affirmative catchphrase much as did earlier intellectual moments promoted by the Western scholarly enterprise. These included “sustainable development”, “social justice”, “the network society” and “de-colonisation”. The current (perhaps de-industrialising) imperative, through herri, is revisualising what this could mean.
Text-based film theorists prevailed during the late 20th century. But now, in the 21st, it is software programmers, game designers and cyber-artists (and cybercriminals) who are driving development, practice and theory. The consumer of new media has moved from being a passive spectator to becoming an active co-author of plot outcomes.
Audiences are not couch potatoes. The interactive nature of digital media especially enables participants to actively co-create meaning, as do the Big Bang characters who often dress up in their superhero outfits when trying, unsuccessfully, to get to Comic Con in San Diego.
We in South Africa can interact with self-styled sci-fi characters at the annual Cape Town and Johannesburg Comic Con exhibitions. Similarly, in gaming, the “storyline” is determined by the choice of the player’s moves.
The magazines discussed here are located in this kind of interactive space that virtually transports tertiary institutions into off-campus communities, hopefully replacing passive inducing banking education with interactive pedagogies and spectactor environments.
The issue involves next-generation narratives, immersed audiences and interactive experiences. These are generated by cross-platform experiences that anticipate new types of audiences searching for deeper access to the minds of the characters they encounter in the digital media. Just as sitcoms like The Big Bang Theory are character driven, some like this series and edutainment programmes also draw on scientists in the stories they tell.
The digital creator can execute future narrative forms to develop a craft-first theory in the climate of the 4IR digital area/canvas. All that’s needed is a smartphone.
Where software companies are tech oriented, there is a need for associated analytical study of the sector and how it is applied, by who, and with what effects. Sitcoms connect with media-savvy students who themselves become the innovators of the future. Hopefully, via a theory-practice collaboration, they can deliver a better one than we have at present.
Keyan Tomaselli is Distinguished Professor, Dean’s Office, Humanities, University of Johannesburg (UJ). Damien was affiliated with the Visual Identities in Art and Design Centre at UJ. He is now assistant professor in cinematography at Nottingham University, Ningbo, China.