Digital Environments

ARIN6912

Literature in the Digital Environment

Ailin Bezzo

309139104

Literature vs. Hypertext The Impending Battle

Electronic text or hypertext offers three distinctive features from the traditional form of literature.

Searchability: searching and locating data is much simpler, with the help of search engines and databases than using a search function in a library or an index in a book.

Links: links within and between documents allow a user to explore wide ranges of data and make connections to supplementary and related text.

Accessibility: self-publication on the Internet allows for a huge rise in quantity of published information, bypassing the delays and constraints of traditional publishing structure. For the user, this means a convenient and inexpensive way to access huge amounts of data that is unavailable in traditional media.

The Internet and Where We're Going

Information technology, particularly the Internet has been, and will continue to be, a huge influence on culture. The Internet encourages a changing sense of geography, capable of influencing globalisation in a way that was previously unavailable, following Benedict Anderson's theory of the imagined community.

Virtual Community

Some uses of the virtual community

Image: http://www.sapdesignguild.org/editions/edition5/images/virt_com_engl.gif

What can the Internet do?

Bring order to our culture:

Bringing order and accessibility to a mass of literature, secondary resources and historical materials.

Allowing easy information retrieval

Hyperlinks within a document place the text within context, creating a relationship between the work, its author and its cultural contexts

Context

Do you think your experience of the book would have been more authentic, given access to your own personal detective unit or do you think that your experience would have been tainted by the responsibility upon you to make your own decision, instead of using the literature as an escape point, to be taken at face value and not analysed further?

The Death of the Text: New values in writing

Freedom that comes with the almost unlimited availability of Internet space.

No size or weight restrictions

No word restrictions

The potential to use as many resources as you choose: all text is relevant, and all text is available

Long and difficult processes of print publishing are bypassed, writers self publish their own work for free

Encourages a larger quantity of work to be presented to a wider audience and the medium, the Internet, allows for greater public access

Quality control: responsibility of the user

See: Bolter, J, D. (2001) Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

http://www.storyspace.net/

Advantages of the Internet

Reorganises the structure of data into a network which is linked and re-linked continuously

Endless possibility, and multiplicity

Links = active learning

User has the freedom to navigate their own discovery

Barthes's concept of the writerly text, which transforms the reader into a user, responsible for shaping his experience of the texts, not just reading and accepting or rejecting.

Barthes's 'Writerly Text'

The reader is no longer subject to the written self. Freed of conventional forms, the reader becomes the user, a producer of the text. This is expanded in Barthes's Pleasure of the Text

Barthes: the networks are many and interact, without any of them being able to surpass the rest. This text is a galaxy of signifiers... it has no beginning... we gain access to it by several entrances, none of which can authoratively declared to be the main one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pleasure_of_the_Text

Derrida's Hope

Derrida, like Barthes, saw the structural and organisational principles of discourse as respressive, and anticipated in hope a text that is plurdimensional, not subject to successivity or linear time.

See: http://www.iep.utm.edu/d/derrida.htm

Limitations of Print

Landow proposes that printed articles and books are restrictively or even manipulatively linear. As long as the reader continues with the book, they are subject to the voice of a singular author.

However, traditional texts, in particular academic text, use a hypertextual structure to link their work and place it within the context of other similar and/or inspiring work.

Internet: Change of Experience

Hypermedia urges readers beyond the closures and certainties of print and urges them to explore the new cultural world of the Internet.

Do you agree with this? That the literary experience of the Internet has so far proved itself to be so separate from the traditional forms? Where do you think this is going? Do you think you would ever abandon traditional books in favour of reading online?

Authentic or a cheap substitute?

Hypertext is accused of inflicting suffering on the canonical literary text, an erosion of its previous sanctity and aura.

Literature on a laptop is uncomfortable, that a laptop is not convenient or portable, in particular if Wi-Fi or wireless Internet aren't available.

Print books are durable and are kept on hand by libraries for the sake of history. Hypertext is volatile, dependant on the owner or host of the information to keep displaying it.

Internet version may be easier to find and acquire. Technology still has a long way to go in terms of creating a device on which downloaded books may be as portable and pleasurable as a printed edition.

In order for downloadable text to become a mainstream practice, it is cultural attitude that must change

Fetishism of the Book

Miller recognises culture's fetishism of the book.

objects of power, knowledge, wealth and wisdom

symbols of authentic, pure culture.

Miller argues that online content displaces respect for the text

Sensation and Simulacrum

Michael Camille asserts that reading the 'iconic pages' of a physical book encompasses a priority of sensation.

That a book can be seen, smelt, touched, tasted, opening pages was a intense sensational delight.

Baudrillard's theory of simulacrum, the representation of an object, of the online screen cannot compete with this inherent, almost innate sensatory exploration of simulacra.

See: Baudrillard, J - Simulacra and Simulations - XI. Holograms
Accessed on 23rd March, 2009 from:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-11-holograms.html

Phenomenology

Conditions based on the subjective, consciousness, judgements, perceptions and emotions have been created around the virtual as a world which exists next to the 'real world,' rather than a further exploration of reality as a whole.

Digital culture is in fact, a melding of the human culture with the man made technology.

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

Phenomenology

The virtual world, an intentional object constituted for consciousness through perception, memory and signification is still constituted as the same identical object as the real world. Consciousness is directed at the two in direct perception, which is why virtual community is even possible, why software like Second Life and other virtual reality games become so apparently real to people.

Virtual World

We live there.

See:Rheingold, H (1993). The Virtual Community.
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

Let's Discuss

Where does literature fit into this digital environment? Will society be able to let go of their inherent attachment to the real world concept and embrace the digitial environment as a further experience of their consciousness? Do you think the authenticity of the print book is simply an inherent link between our ancestors and socio-economic notions? Do you think it's a romantic notion to have a tangible copy rather than engaging in hyperreality?

Conclusions for the Future

The Internet is definitely a huge influence to our culture, one which has even been deemed a democratic technology, an opportunity for marginalised culture, and a tool for globalisation, to assist in the realisation of the imagined community. The Internet follows a postmodernist discourse, in that it offers a regenerative energy to trangress the boundaries set by modernism and nationalism, to call attention to to the sphere of culture as shifting social and historical construction

Sources

Deuze, M (2006). 'Participation, remediation, bricolage: considering principal components of a digital culture,' The Information Society 22 [2].

Browner, S. P., R. Sears, et al. (2000). 'Literature and the Internet: some theoretical considerations,' in Literature and the Internet: a guide for students, teachers and scholars. New York: Garland

Anderson, B. (1983). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_(philosophy)

Rheingold, H (1993). The Virtual Community.
Accessed on 22nd March, 2009 from:
http://www.rheingold.com/vc/book/intro.html

Baudrillard, J - Simulacra and Simulations - XI. Holograms
Accessed on 23rd March, 2009 from:
http://www.egs.edu/faculty/baudrillard/baudrillard-simulacra-and-simulation-11-holograms.html

Sources

Hill, J (2009). 'Publishers head to Online Networks' in Sydney Morning Herald
Accessed on 23rd March, 2009 from:
http://www.smh.com.au/news/digital-life/games/articles/publishers-head-to-online-networks/2009/03/18/1237054828769.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simulacra

Bolter, J, D. (2001) Writing Space: Computers, Hypertext, and the Remediation of Print, Second Edition. Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Storyspace

http://www.storyspace.net/

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