blog

A chapter about a web site Stefans hosted, Circulars, which "was founded on January 30, 2003, to provide a focal point for poets’ and artists’ activities and reflections on the impending inva- sion of Iraq along with the politics of the media and civil liberties issues." (quote from first sentence of chapter).

How did it become normal to share from our personal lives on the public internet? This documentary overshare: the links.net story looks at the limits of one person's desire for online attention. 

Hello, my name is Justin Hall and I've been sharing my personal life in explicit detail online for over twenty years. Starting in 1994, my personal web site Justin's Links from the Underground has documented family secrets, romantic relationships, and my experiments with sex and drugs.

overshare: the links.net story is a documentary about fumbling to foster intimacy between strangers online. Through interviews, analysis and graphic animations, I share my motivations, my joys and my sorrows from pioneering personal sharing for the 21st century. In 2004 the New York Times referred to me as "perhaps the founding father of personal weblogging." I hope this documentary reveals that I was a privileged white male with access to technology who worked to invite as many people as possible to join him in co-creating an internet where we have a chance to honestly share of our humanity.

Find the whole video free and even pay for it at http://overshare.links.net/

This film is released under a Creative Commons license.

(Source: Author)

What are we talking about when we say “digital literature” today? If the early works of electronic literature – hypertext fiction, hypermedia literature, generative texts – could be identified by the distinguishing feature of hyperlink or technology in a wider sense, nowadays Twitterature, literary blogs, and Facebook writings challenge more and more the possibility to define this kind of literature under a solely technology-based perspective. The Canada Research Chair on Digital Textualities' project “Répertoire des écrivaines et écrivains numériques,” inspired by the CELL project, is an attempt to mind the existing gap between these new textual objets and literary studies. In this presentation, we will show and discuss the criteria upon which we have defined what is a digital literary object and a digital author, the archiving modalities of those objects, and the epistemological structure of our project in order to think about the impact of the digital turn on literary concepts such as author, authorship, literary work, and genre.

Source: https://sites.grenadine.uqam.ca/sites/nt2/en/elo2018/schedule/619/The+%…

In his seminal essay “What Is an Author?” Michel Foucault maintains that we can only accept literary discourses if they carry an author’s name. Every text of poetry or fiction is obliged to state its author, and if, by accident or design, the text is presented anonymously, we can only accept this as a puzzle to be solved, or, one could add, as an exceptional experiment about authorship that is verifying the rule. This was in 1969. In the meantime, a profound change of all forms of social interaction has been taking place. Amongst them are works of electronic literature that use the computer in an aesthetic way to create combinatory, interactive, intermedial and performative art. One could argue, of course, that electronic literature as new media art often only is a proof of a concept addressed to the few tech-savvy select. However, these purportedly avant-garde pieces break the ground for developments that might happen barely noticed, and by this serve an important political, ideological, aesthetic and commercial purpose. Amongst these developments is a change of the seemingly irrevocable rule of the author in literary discourses. In the realm of digital writing, there is a group of texts that seem to systematically depart from the supremacy of the author function. None of them makes this its objective nor its topic. It just happens that digital writings with a certain set of common features in their production and reception processes do away with the author function and allows to focus, as Foucault hypothesizes, on the modes of existence of these discourses, their origin and circulation, and their controller.

In my paper, I would like to look at the production and reception processes of a number of canonical digital literary texts, amongst them Toby Litt’s blog fiction Slice, the huge collaborative writing project A Million Penguins, Reneé Turner’s mash-up fiction She…, Michael Joyce’s Afternoon, and Charles Cumming’s Google-Maps mash-up The 21 Steps. They all share what I call delayed textonic authorship, i.e. contributions to and modification of the text that happen further to the end in the continuum of production and reception. They also share various expressions of uneasiness with traditional authorial roles and ultimately a departure from the supremacy of the author function. Looking at the primary texts, one can see various forms of disintegration of the author function, amongst them escape from one text into another, the indistinguishability of authors and characters, scolding of the authors by the editors, disorientation over the limits of one’s own text, and the renouncement of authorship.

In my paper, I would like to visualize the structural novelties in the production/reception processes of such texts by using the new model of the textual action space. I would also like to showcase the particularities of dealing with shifts of the author function and show that the departure from the author function does, indeed, not only allow us, as Foucault has predicted, to look at the modes of existence of discourses, their origin and circulation, and the underlying power structures; this is precisely what we are forced to look at when the author function is absent in aesthetic discourse. The insights gained by analysing electronic literature this way enable us to fundamentally rethink the possible commercial ends of literary production.

(Source: ELO 2015 Conference Catalog)

Blogs (also known as web logs) are web pages in which dated entries appear in reverse chronological order, so that the reader views the most recently written entries first. Blogs emerged as a web genre in the late 1990s, and as simple and free publishing tools became available at the turn of the twenty-first century, blogging activity has increased exponentially. Since anyone with an Internet connection can publish a blog, the quality of writing on blogs can vary considerably, and blogs may be written about diverse subjects and for many diff fferent purposes. Blogs can be diff fferentiated according to their function, as knowledge-management tools, which filter information, or personal blogs, which are used to document and refl flect on the blogger’s life history. Both types of blog are highly varied and hybrid genres. Personal blogs are infl fluenced by online forms of communication such as e-mail and personal web pages, along with offl ffline genres of life history, particularly diary writing and autobiography. Filter blogs have their antecedents in bulletin boards and Listservs. Blogs can also be categorized according to their topic or relevance to a par ticular interest group. Examples of the genre include blogs written about travel, health, politics, sex, legal matters, and cookery, alongside blogs written for professional purposes on behalf of corporations or as part of educational practice.

(Johns Hopkins University Press)