Kayla's Final Essay #1: Moby Dick and Online Communities

A traditional part of the literary canon such as Moby Dick has a lot to teach us about modern digital culture. The way Ishmael, Ahab, and the crew interact in the novel help us to understand the creation of communities in digital culture today, and their teachings affect the way we produce even traditional scholarly research.

When Ahab tells the crew of their true mission and calls out “Death to Moby Dick!” (148), he immediately creates a tight-knit community. The crew looks to him as a leader and holds a common goal of killing Moby Dick, even though Ahab is the only one with a reason for a personal vendetta. We see similar types of online communities forming around specialized topics as well. These communities often create the kind of enthusiasm that gives them the title of “fandoms.” One of my classmates, Victoria, posted a series of blog posts and wrote a paper on the value of fandoms in digital culture, commenting on the need to remove a sense of apathy toward the study of the humanities. The formation of these fandoms may seem to happen over a short period of time, as it does in Moby Dick, but their influence is far reaching, creating interested consumers and content creators who are anything but apathetic.

One of the great contributions of online communities is the way they assist us with research. We are supposed to consult experts in a field of study, but how do we decide who is best? In our current abundance economy, we can find more information than we know how to process. Online communities help to narrow down the most important experts by collaboratively picking them out of the crowd to focus on.

Researchers in the digital age learn to focus on the people instead of simply ideas. Moby Dick focuses on a single whale, but the people involved and obsessed with the whale are much more important than which whale is being singled out. The enthusiasts and experts, who consist of Ahab and others, point us in the right direction. Moby Dick allows us to understand the need and uses for online communities, and more importantly, it helps us to take advantage of them to get to the influential people on certain topics.