new media

This book introduces an archaeological approach to the study of media - one that sifts through the evidence to learn how media were written about, used, designed, preserved, and sometimes discarded. Edited by Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka, with contributions from internationally prominent scholars from Europe, North America, and Japan, the essays help us understand how the media that predate today’s interactive, digital forms were in their time contested, adopted and embedded in the everyday. Providing a broad overview of the many historical and theoretical facets of Media Archaeology as an emerging field, the book encourages discussion by presenting a full range of different voices. By revisiting ‘old’ or even ‘dead’ media, it provides a richer horizon for understanding ‘new’ media in their complex and often contradictory roles in contemporary society and culture.

The world as we know it is changing: drones can deliver burritos, cars can drive themselves, all movies are remakes, and our middle school math teachers were all wrong – we do always have a calculator in our pocket. Welcome to the future! We’re talking about your smartphone. These small rectangular devices have affected nearly every aspect of our lives. New media is no exception. For this issue, we have curated a collection of pieces, both desktop and mobile, that exemplify all that new media has to offer in this future we live in.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Spring/editor.html)

When you consider that writing as a form hasn’t really changed all that much since The Epic of Gilgamesh, some 4,000 years ago, what’s occurring in the world of new media becomes that much more impressive. Digital writing is already able to do things that authors aspired towards for years; incorporating visuals, music, and sound, as well as interacting directly with audience. In this issue we’ve tried to put forth work that exemplifies the wide range new media is capable of.

(Source: https://www.cddc.vt.edu/journals/newriver/18Fall/editor.html)

Electronic literature (e-lit) constitutes one of the most innovative and exciting literary forms occurring today; it is the unique child of this new technological age. Scandinavian e-lit is no exception, yet it has frequently been overlooked by literary academics in both the United States and Scandinavia. This dissertation investigates how Scandinavian e-lit engages with printed Scandinavian literature, and how critical analysis of Scandinavian literature can benefit from an understanding of e-lit. In this dissertation I argue that, far from relegation to the outer margins of Scandinavian literary research and studies, Scandinavian e-lit, and scholarship on such works, ought to occupy a central position in the field, alongside print-based counterparts. Such a shift in focus would create a new vantage point from which Scandinavianists could analyze canonical and contemporary works of print-based Scandinavian literature.

Chapter one addresses the effect of the corporeal body on the electronic text and the reading experience, while the second chapter examines Scandinavian works of e-lit to investigate how these resemble and/or distinguish themselves from codex-based literature. Chapter three provides a detailed, close reading of Primärdirektivet/The Prime Directive by Swedish poet-artist Johannes Heldén, as an example of analytical approaches to works with multi-modal capacities. Finally, chapter four discusses the institutional support, and new analytical tools Scandinavian literary scholars are developing to effectively research, evaluate, and teach this form of literature. In short, this dissertation explores what Scandinavian e-lit is, what its relationship to conventional literature is, how it functions, and how we can understand it.

My hope is that future Scandinavian literary scholarship, and academic study will not only incorporate works of Scandinavian e-lit into these activities, but that their inclusion will become routine. Integrating the study of e-lit into established literary practice not only offers opportunities to understand literary movements, themes, styles and relationships among works of Scandinavian literature (as its print-based counterpart does), but it also affords the opportunity to reconsider the nature and potential of literature itself. As such, it is a bright field of potential, as well as an innovative, fascinating form of contemporary literary art.

It is well known that any formulaic genre has a predictable story and a conventional meaning, nevertheless what makes each story unique is the ethos, that is to say the relationship between characters and environment. When the environment is digital, new media renegotiate traditional formulaic features, as is the case with detective stories and crime fiction in e-literature. The paper illustrates how digital ontology shapes the relationship between the ethos and the law. Indeed digital technology determines not only the criminal deed and the method of investigation, but it also highlights how the perception of the crime and the resultant moral or legal responsibility are more and more undetermined in social interaction. For Christie’s inter-war fiction or in American hard-boiled literature, the issue of social order was crucial, but contemporary aporia calls into question the happy ending of the investigation. We can anticipate that in electronic crime fiction the final social order and the need for penalty measures are not part of the storytelling. A brief overview of electronic detective stories will be given, even if particular attention will be paid on Elliot Holt's #TwitterFiction Story Was it a suicide? A homicide? Or an accident? Read and decide...1. In the latter, Miranda, the victim, is the product of digital media communication, and as any other digital object she is ontologically abstract. She simply exists in the relationship between digital subjectivity (communicated via social media by the other characters of the story) and a hyper-real objectivity made of binary code. Technically speaking she is a sequence of 0 and 1 or, as John Searle would say, she is syntax. Holt creates a character who is exiled from the objectivist system, although she exists in a social network for the followers and the readers. Somehow she is locked into some tweets, but beyond the real world. How can a police investigation cope with this? Now social media communication seems to undermine or dispossess reality of the concepts of “reference” and “referent”. The risk to overlap what is inside or outside the digital world, is truly existing, as the murder committed in Cleveland in 2017 to be posted on Facebook suggests. If in the past, a writer gave the reader a criminal case to solve within the rules of law, nowadays a digital writer gives his readers an experience. Actually, readers are no longer asked to share the detective's acumen and insight, but to participate to the criminal case. Today the anticanonical digital detective fiction does not merely tell stories of crimes and justice, but they put on stage how the Law does no longer play its role in society. Nowadays law tries to codify online and offline behaviours, rights and duties, but the more the relationship between these two realities are undefined the harder it is for the law to be effective and incisive in its goal. A more general difference between good and evil seems to be enough for the public of eliterature. Considerations about the Ethics Guidelines For Trustworthy AI, released by the the European Commission’s High-Level Expert Group On Artificial Intelligence, will be taken into consideration.

Entering the cyberdebates, Scott Rettberg moves beyond technique and proposes a more generative approach to hypertext, in which an author's intention and poetic purpose have a role.

(Source:Electronic Book Review) 

The Convergence between Print and Digital Literature in Blackout Poetry study the phenomenon of the “blackout poetry” both in the digital and the physical world. According to Ralph Heibutzki, on Demand Media, “Blackout Poetry focuses on reordering words to create a different meaning. Also known as the newspaper blackout poetry, in it, the author uses a permanent marker to cross out or delete words or images that he sees as unnecessary or irrelevant to the effect he is trying to create. The central idea is to design a new text from the words and images published previously, but finally, the reader is free to interpret as he wants.”

We describe six common misconceptions about platform studies, a family of approaches to digital media focused on the underlying computer systems that support creative work. We respond to these and clarify the platform studies concept.

(Source: Authors' abstract)