For my final project, I will be exploring the digital page and writing a scholarly essay that examines the sociocultural evolution of the page through a media archaeology framework. The transformation of the page spans centuries but in this digital epoch of history, technology has fundamentally changed the why and how the digital page matters. The internet serves as the contemporary printing press but understanding why derives from a long non-linear history.

My work will be based on Bonnie Mak’s “How the Page Matters”, as well as pulling from other texts that Dr. Pressman mentioned over the semester. Steven Johnson’s “Interface Culture” will help in ushering in the 21st century perspective of how the digital interface has changed how we look at the webpage as a tool. Additionally, I will position and introduce media archaeology through “An Archaeology of Media Archaeology” Erkki Huhtahmo and Jussi Parikka’s work, which helps guide the definition the term as “existing somewhere between materialist media theories and the insistence on the value of the obsolete and forgotten through new cultural histories that have emerged since the 1980s.” In consideration of past technologies and the temporality each incurred in its era, there is profound meaning in understanding why the digital page matters today. I have not yet looked into N. Katherine Hayle’s works but I am also interested in “How We Became Posthuman” as a means of further refining digital page in contemporary society. By understanding media archaeology and the blend of old and new media, there is a futuristic purpose in design, materiality, and content that derives from the reexamination of past iterations of media. In turn, literary history and content is continuously evolving alongside older forms but is not meant to erase it, but only to improve based on the user and who they communicate to.