To demonstrate the points of social proof and social discovery in a humanities context, I wanted to share a recent encounter that I had with
Harold Bloom, the esteemed Yale sterling scholar. I had been
researching Paradise Lost's Satan figure for an undergraduate class on John Milton, and I came across an article that stated that Bloom had advised the author to read
Paradise Lost from a secularist view. This was right in line with the claim that I was trying to prove, but searching through Bloom's scholarly publications, I wasn't able to find much of anything that contributed to my understanding of the topic. I had the presumption to try contacting Dr. Bloom himself for more info, and while I honestly didn't expect a response--especially not from someone so prominent within the literary community--I figured it was worth a shot if anything that my digital writing professor
had been saying was true. I was very pleasantly surprised when, two days later, I opened my inbox to find a response. My email was as follows:
Dr. Bloom's response was, predictably, brief and somewhat impersonal, but he pointed me to a chapter in
one of his books that deals specifically with my topic. Perhaps more importantly, though, his feedback got me excited about my work. It gave new life to my research and made me feel like I was really engaging in a topic that mattered--at least enough so that Harold Bloom was willing to give me feedback on it. Too often, we look at writing as an isolated process--as a communion with books and scholarly articles rather than as something that could connect us to meaningful conversations and real, living people. I acknowledge that in the end, my interaction with Dr. Bloom led me yet again to a book, a static text, but that's yet another beauty of the digital or social research model: its recursive structure leads us back once more to authoritative resources while revitalizing and providing new meaning and significance for older works. In such a way, digital writing justifies the relevance of the humanities within modern contexts and provides means for granting new life to the discipline as a whole.
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