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Although the phrase sometimes refers to issues surrounding copyright and open access and sometimes to scholarship analyzing the online world, digital scholarship—emanating, perhaps, from digital humanities—most frequently describes discipline-based scholarship produced with digital tools and presented in digital form.

Though the recent popularity of the phrase digital scholarship reflects impressive interdisciplinary ambition and coherence, two crucial elements remain in short supply in the emerging field. First, the number of scholars willing to commit themselves and their careers to digital scholarship has not kept pace with institutional opportunities. Second, today few scholars are trying, as they did earlier in the web's history, to reimagine the form as well as the substance of scholarship. In some ways, scholarly innovation has been domesticated, with the very ubiquity of the web bringing a lowered sense of excitement, possibility, and urgency. These two deficiencies form a reinforcing cycle: the diminished sense of possibility weakens the incentive for scholars to take risks, and the unwillingness to take risks limits the impact and excitement generated by boldly innovative projects.

The real argument, then, is not about when and how traditional formats like the PDF will be replaced; it’s about accepting that the familiar (and perhaps boring) research article still has its purpose, while at the same time thinking ambitiously and creatively about how the humble document can be supplemented with the modern features and functions that the digital environment offers.

The human/drawing interaction trope that Zuckerberg is rebranding as Facebook’s own innovation even predates animated cartoons. One type of scrapbook, the paper dollhouse, played with the appeal of mixing real-life and an invented world. It was most popular from 1875-1920, and over forty years its form remained consistent: A dollhouse unfolded theatrically to create illusions of progress and depth.

Winsor McCay’s Gertie the Dinosaur is generally considered the first animated cartoon ever, and it made use of the same trope of mixing reality and man-made art when it premiered all the way back in 1914. McCay was a cartoonist famous for the Freudian, surrealist comic Little Nemo in Slumberland, which was published in weekly instalments in the New York Herald and New York American—though its material is more frequently compared to Bosch than to Garfield. McCay, already two hits deep into his career in the first decade of the twentieth century, purportedly decided to animate a comic strip in 1909 on a dare from friends griping about his daunting productivity. Following a brief stint with an animated Nemo, McCay developed Gertie the Dinosaur, an amiable brontosaurus with a stoner grin, and took her on a vaudeville roadshow across America.

LAST MONTH Facebook premiered its vision for the future at its development conference, F8. The camera-app technology Mark Zuckerberg calls augmented reality (or AR) borrows heavily from the social network Snapchat, which enables users to layer animated digital content onto photos on the fly. On stage, Zuckerberg promoted this collaging as social media’s first steps toward modish virtual screen manipulations. “This will allow us to create all kinds of things that were only available in the digital world,” Zuckerberg bubbled effusively. “We’re going to interact with them and explore them together.” Taken in, USA Today repeated this claim to innovation, elaborating on the digital mogul’s Jules Verne-like promise: “We will wander not one, but two worlds—the physical and the digital,” For my part, I was particularly delighted by Facebook’s proposal to animate bowls of cereal with marauding cartoon sharks, savoring, perhaps, the insouciant violence I associate with childhood adventure.

Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says.

Instead of working, they are playing video games. About three quarters of the increase in leisure time among men since 2000 has gone to gaming. Total time spent on computers, including game consoles, has nearly doubled. You might think that this would be demoralizing. A life spent unemployed, living at home, without romantic prospects, playing digital time wasters does not sound particularly appealing on its face. Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called "innovations in leisure computer activities for young men." The problems come later. A young life spent playing video games can lead to a middle age without marketable skills or connections. "There is some evidence," Hurst pointed out, "that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s." So are these guys just wasting their lives, frittering away their time on anti-social activities? Hurst describes his figures as "staggering" and "shocking"—a seismic shift in the relationship of young men to work. "Men in their 20s historically are a group with a strong attachment to the labor force," he writes. "The decline in employment rates for low-skilled men in their 20s was larger than it was for all other sex, age, and skill groups during this same time period." But there's another way to think about the change: as a shift in their relationship to unemployment. Research has consistently found that long-term unemployment is one of the most dispiriting things that can happen to a person. Happiness levels tank and never recover. One 2010 study by a group of German researchers suggests that it's worse, over time, for life satisfaction than even the death of a spouse. What video games appear to do is ease the psychic pain of joblessness—and to do it in a way that is, if not permanent, at least long-lasting. For low-skilled young men, what is the alternative to playing games? We might like to imagine that they would all become sociable and highly productive members of society, but that is not necessarily the case.

A military shooter might offer a simulation of being a crack special forces soldier. A racing game might simulate learning to handle a performance sports car. A sci-fi role-playing game might simulate becoming an effective leader of a massive space colonization effort. But what you're really doing is training yourself to effectively identify on-screen visual cues and twitch your thumb at the right moment. You're learning to handle a controller, not a gun or a race car. You're learning to manage a game's hidden stats system, not a space station. A game provides the sensation of mastery without the actual ability. "It's a simulation of being an expert," Wolpaw says. "It's a way to fulfill a fantasy." That fantasy, ultimately, is one of work, purpose, and social and professional success.