Monthly Archives: March 2010

There has always been this fascination, bordering with obsession about the future. Neal Stephenson plays with this fascination in his story line of the book The Diamond Age. It is perhaps the way he manipulates our perception of our reality with a futuristic value-changed reality which confuses and then intrigues the reader. Katherine Hayles also discusses the future in her book Electronic Literature. The last chapter explores the future of literature, which is what I will be focusing on in this post.

Hayles expresses that “nothing is riskier than prediction; when the future arrives, we can be sure only tha it will be different than we anticipated.” I wonder however, if this is really true. When I watch cartoons and films about the future, they are not necessarily that different than we anticipated. Yet, she explains the way that all contemporary literature is already digital media. A point I didn’t really think about before. When I though of all the papers I have written in the past years (many) of my college experience, I reflected on the fact that they are all digital and could easily be shared on the internet with other users (or sold as seems to become more common among introductory level students who are anxious to get an easy grade).

I really liked that she was citing Professor Fitzpatrick and The Anxiety of Obsolescence. I agree that perception of risk is more important than the reality of the risk and that we must explore the cultural and social functions and how these affect the perceptions of people (161).  I really like to learn more about “the advantage of establishing the novelists as an at-risk minority while still allowing this group to retain their hegemonic position as while male authors” explained by Hayles (161). I completely agree with this, particularly when looking at the over-representation of white males in the population of scholars who monopolize literature and academia.  Hayles expresses that the situation is more complex than that, yet fails to explain this complexity.  I found her discussion which followed on imitating and intensifying aspects of electronic textuality very interesting and worth discussing further in class.

Overall, her conclusion brings up interesting points, which include the ideas of exploring natural language with mechanical codes in digital technologies. Hayles (going back to Fitzpatrick’s point) concludes by pointing out that “we must explore the dynamics that interrogate and reconfigure the relations between authors and readers, humans and intelligent machines, code and language” (186). The best way to understand or attempt to make sense of this interaction is by looking at the effects and the changes that have affected our culture and society and the way we interact with media in contemporary times.

Sitting in the airport waiting for my flight back to Ontario, I stumbled across a book review in today’s issue of the New York Times all about the future of print culture: “Texts Without Context” by Michiko Kakutani. If you’re in post-spring break recovery mode and looking for a way to get your brain back in shape for class, check it out!

Hey,

Here’s a link to my blog so far.  It’s a work in process, but the first post is meant to serve as an outline.

http://anaylzethisblogthat.blogspot.com/

I’m still working on making to more visually appealing, but that may take me a little bit longer.

I. For my project A Poetic Freeway I plan on using a variety of mediums on which I will write my poems, all of which will be interconnected and even loop in on themselves.

A. I plan on composing a story containing somewhere from 15-25 poems all varying in length and form that address the idea of technology and the way it has affected our culture in modern society. 

1. I will use are digital text, videos (images I filmed with the poems dubbed over), recordings (mp3), and paper (writing and typewriter).

2. I plan on having there be the same amount of poems for each different medium.  The mediums

B. My project will be presented as a website that contains the videos, recordings and digital text, however, for my poems on paper I will create little booklets and distribute them to everyone in class (some will contain photographs related to the poem). 

1. Once on my website there will be a specific poem that starts off the story.

2. All of the poems will have three options of different poems after you’ve finished reading them (they will vary in which medium they’re presented).

3. At the end of each poem you will have the opportunity to choose between links that take you to different poems on the web page or I will present the title of one of the poems in the booklet and its page number as one of the three options.

4. Some of the poems will send you back to a poem that you might have already read (loop back into themselves).

II.  I want the audience to take into consideration not only the message behind each poem but the way in which reading them in different mediums affected their reading of the story. Considering I have a limited number of poems, I’m pretty sure everyone will get through the entire story. 

A.            My hope is that everyone can write a paragraph describing their experience while reading the poems.

B.             At the end, I hope to have a discussion about the different experiences everyone had.

There was a really cool program on PBS Frontline recently: Digital Nation, an in-depth look at “life in the digital age” produced by Rachel Dretzin and co-hosted by cuddly new media guru Douglas Rushkoff. If you have some down time over break, I highly recommend it! The program addresses many issues that have come up in our class discussions, especially the question of how interaction with digital media may be rewiring young brains.

You can stream the whole thing from their website, which also houses a lot of interesting web-only interviews and discussions, all potential fodder for our term projects! Fascinating stuff.

I came across this article today: http://www.aaronrosspowell.com/blog/my-experience-selling-a-draft-novel-on-the-amazon-kindle.

Powell is a published author who used the Kindle as a way to publish his newest novel in a “beta” stage, or a draft. His idea was that he could make a little money off the draft (selling it around $3 in hopes it would be an ‘impulse’ buy) and that he could get some feedback on the draft before the final publication. He found that the book sold well, but that he only got a few reviews. He concluded that while Kindle might be a great way to get your  book out to readers, it may not be the place to gather feedback (he opted for his website for feedback.)

We have talked about how the Kindle changes the medium of delivery for novels, however this brings up new ideas of how to interact with a novel. This form of delivery is comparable to Professor Fitzpatrick’s book, where she was able to get comments on the manuscript before it went to publication in book form. I think that fans of authors might appreciate an early delivery of a work, in the hopes that they might be able to contribute their ideas.

The Kindle does bring up modes of interactivity. It may be because it is a new technology, but it seems that the Internet has been a better forum for feedback and discussion. Therefore, the Kindle might be a mode of distribution, but ultimately the Internet will remain the forum for readers to interact with the author and other readers.