Article in an online journal

At the start of the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, two tribes of apes get into a fight over a watering hole, and one group drives off the other. The apes who have been driven away are depressed, and just sit around moping when one of them gets the idea to use a thigh bone of some large animal as a club. First he tries it out on a few dried ribs that are lying about,1 then he uses it to bring down one of the tapirs that had, up until this moment, lived peacefully among the apes in an idyllic, Garden-of-Eden symbiosis. Suddenly, we are back at the watering hole, more of a mud puddle really, and the ape that invented the club is at the head of his troupe, all of whom are armed with their own bone clubs. The larger, stronger apes are still there, furious at the reappearance of the weaker group. They attack, using all the usual monkey strategies for waging war: shrieks, baring of teeth, pounding of chests and quick feints, during which the individual who’d invented the bone club stands upright—more like a man than an ape—and when the leader of the other pack rushes at him on all fours, he uses his club to bash in this ape’s brains, and we can’t help but be struck by how the tool has made the man. No matter what Benjamin Franklin says about Man being the tool-making animal, it’s the tool—the club—that made this ape stand upright: it’s impossible to swing a club when walking on all fours; from a hunched-over, ape-like position, you can’t get the leverage needed to swing a tool to chop wood, hit a golf ball, win wars, and so on.Source: Abstract by the Author

Cell phone is one of the most popular and portable of almost all the modern electronic gadgets used in the modern world, especially by young men and women. A cell phone nowadays has become a multi-purpose household electronic device since its utility has been highly increasing day by day, for speaking and chatting, for sending and receiving messages, as a camera, as a storehouse of a number of valuable information, as a music player and recorder (voice recorder too), as an FM radio, as a calculator, as a modem for internet connection and internet surfing, as a medium for advertisement, even as a medium for conducting bank transactions, as a mini-projector and so on. Recently it has become the latest form of entertainment, in providing novels for readers through its screen which has been called by various names such as cell phone novel, mobile phone novel, text messaging novel, m-novel, m-lit, cell literature, phone novel, and even as SMS novel.

(source: Introduction of Cell Phone Novel A New Genre of Literature)

This article examines an aesthetic experience associated with the digital, which is characterized by the ability of the reader to interact, participate, and manipulate literary works created in this format. First, a map of Chilean digital literature will be presented and then two aspects will be analyzed which allow a description of an aesthetic of the digital: hypertextuality and cultural hacking. As a result of this analysis, and considering that digital literature is that which is created to be read on the screen of an electronic device, two poems will be investigated: A veces cubierto por las aguas by Carlos Cociña and Clickable poem@s by Luis Correa-Díaz.These texts allow us to think about the status of literature and poetry in the digital era, linked with an aesthetic experience which emphasizes intervention and the wish to participate.

In her article "Networks of Collaboration and Creation in Latin American Digital Literature" Carolina Gainza examines how production and reception of literature have been affected by digital technology, with special emphasis on issues related to Latin American digital literature. Gainza analyzes Jaime Alejandro Rodriguez's Narratopedia, Doménico Chiappe's La Huella de Cosmos, and Leonardo Valencia's and Eugenio Tiselli's El Libro Flotante in order to highlight collective practices of creation involved in digital productions. Through the discussion of these issues, Gainza offers an overview of ongoing changes wrought by digital technology in contemporary Latin American digital culture.

“More is not necessarily more. Faster is not necessarily better. Big data is not necessarily better.” In the effort to capture and make available data about people, digital humanities scholars must now weigh the decisions of what and what not to share. Geoffrey Rockwell and Bettina Berendt address the new ethical issues around “datafication” in an age of surveillance.

(Source: EBR)

Mark Amerika on establishing an electronic publishing network in the no-man’s land between the commercial, the academic, and the underground.

(Source: EBR)

In between bubble and burst, e-commerce drew much of its content from donated labor. Tiziana Terranova questions just how “free” such labor has proved in practice.

(Source: EBR)