Sustainable Musicology

(© Sustainable Musicology)

Cyber Humanities and Sustainability:
A Question of Measure

In recent years, and with particular intensity in the most recent period, attempts to rethink the role of the humanities within an environment ever more deeply shaped by digital infrastructures and algorithmic systems have multiplied.

Within this framework also lies the recent proposal of the Cyber Humanities manifesto (Adorni-Bellini), understood as a critical evolution of the Digital Humanities, alongside other reflections that, from different perspectives, investigate the relationship between technology, knowledge production, and cultural responsibility.

This is not simply a matter of using new tools, but of reflecting on the conditions within which such tools operate and on the effects they may produce in the medium and long term. Yet precisely at this level a problematic issue emerges that deserves to be made explicit. The risk is that the shift from one formulation to another—from Digital Humanities to Cyber Humanities—may amount more to a terminological redefinition than to a real change of perspective. In other words, that work may continue within the same operational horizon, merely correcting some premises without questioning its deeper presuppositions.

The decisive question, in fact, is not only how to integrate digital technologies and artificial intelligence in a conscious way, but whether the research practices they tend to generate are, from the outset, sustainable. Sustainable not in a generically environmental sense (an orientation now inevitable, yet already insufficient) but in a broader perspective: epistemological, temporal, and human.

On the epistemological level, the issue concerns the effectiveness of the knowledge produced. The growing accumulation of data, the proliferation of platforms, and the multiplication of digital projects risk generating an ungovernable redundancy. In the absence of clear selective criteria, quantity may end up prevailing over significance, with the result of knowledge that is ever more extensive and yet ever less incisive.

On the temporal level, the problem of duration arises. The well-known volatility of digital media, subject to technological obsolescence and infrastructural precariousness, raises far from marginal questions about the transmission of research results. Databases, digital editions, collaborative platforms: often invaluable tools, but whose long-term survival is by no means guaranteed, chiefly because of poor (or even aleatory) digital governance.

Finally, on the human level, one cannot ignore the impact of digital practices on the quality of academic work. The management of complex projects, the constant pressure of connectivity, the fragmentation of activities, and the risk of burnout are factors that increasingly affect the lives of researchers in visible ways. Any reflection on sustainability cannot leave this aspect aside.

In this context, the Cyber Humanities may represent a useful opportunity, but on one condition: that they do not merely propose a new model, but accept being subjected to a more radical critical scrutiny. Indeed, before multiplying paradigms, one should ask what conditions allow them to remain practicable, transmissible, and humanly sustainable. One should ask whether the humanities, in a computationally mediated context, are still capable of maintaining a genuinely vital relationship with their objects of study. One should determine what is worth producing, preserving, and transmitting. That is, one should bring back to the center a classical dimension of “measure” that today seems almost completely lost.

In conclusion, sustainability does not appear here as a slogan, nor as a simple corrective, but as a principle of regulation. It does not add a new theme to the debate, but invites us to reconsider its very conditions of possibility. It is along this line of inquiry, in an open confrontation over the limits and responsibilities proper to contemporary humanistic work, that dialogue among different perspectives may avoid shrinking into a mere succession of labels.