Darren Tofts reviews a popularization by Marie O’Mahony and an auto-critique of cyberculture by Andrew Murphie and John Potts.
Andrew McMurry looks back on ten years of ecocriticism and identifiesa “new physiocracy,” whose exclusive interest in technology is no better than the exclusive valuation of property that typified physiocrats of the Nineteenth-Century.
(source: http://electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/ecocritical)
Paul Harris hybridizes the terms of hypertextual discourse and takes it to a higher power.
The spirit or at least pervasive desire of our age revolves around a sort of transparency: a desire to project ourselves as a surface of permeable traces, to exfoliate, let the inside become the outside, to become fully visible like the meat and bones of a Cronenberg character, while remaining invisible like the little hacker ghost (Turing’s Demon?) that tracks text in the Random Access Memory banks of the machine onto whose screen we splash words. In large part, the attractive force that transparency exerts is an effect of media culture; simultaneously, however, transparency marks a limit of im-mediacy - an unmediated, collapsed sensation where we can see the neurophysiology of our brains or the shapes of and linkages among our words. This is an immediacy of the sensory that never shades into the tactile - it is rather the immediacy of sensing the medium itself, of clicking tracks around the computer screen or dredging up hidden treasures on the Netscape of our lives.
“network” is a promiscuous and ubiquitous term, serving many functions in describing our modes of conduct and perception of the world: network serves as a structural design principle, modus operandi, technological environment and constraint, as a textual space and psychological model all in one.
wanted:Guild is a new take on interactive documentary that uses spatial exploration to fuel story. Through audience interaction with audio nodes a narrative is revealed about the intersection of the real and virtual lives of hardcore World of Warcraft gamers. wanted: Guild offers a peek behind the screen for the casual and non-gamer, revealing to them a world of complexity that is often overlooked.
(Source: Elo conference: First encounters 2014)
The objective of this communication is the application of ideas and tools encountered in the field of study of narratology and its consideration as a narrative genre so that the chosen work, Fitting the Pattern, may be analysed and differences seen that may arise when approached from a different frame of the print. It is hoped to show with this approach, how in order to be studied, digital narrative works require new concepts and how more investigation is needed into how the reader receives the work. For example, after analyzing the work of Christine Wilks it was seen to be necessary to deepen the skills required by the reader in order to enter into the work, to establish functional guidelines for the reader, so as to remain within the orientation of the text, etc. It is not just a question concerning only in how the work is received, but also how space and the other approaches to the work need concepts and approaches which are more adequate for the reality presented by the digital narrative. As has been shown in the analysis of Fitting the Pattern, it has not been possible to capture all that is contained in the text using the type of analysis used up to now. The narrative digital work chosen for this analysis is Fitting the Pattern because it is a clear example of a literary digital work which does not only “play” or experiment with the tools used by the digital world, but also presents a rich literary piece, which like all ergodic texts is difficult to penetrate. The images and the sound are not mere esthetic or modern additions but are clearly narrative voices which tell the story. Furthermore, together with the semi-controlled distribution of the plot they add further complexity to the analysis of time and space. The difficulties and the complexity of the work however, far from discouraging the reader motivates and inspires them to reread the work.
My argument here is that different modalities of textual performance must necessarily lead to the classification of print-precursors as precisely that: precursors and not hypertext per se.
My thesis thus proposes that hypertext must be conceived in terms of performance and that approaching the problem of a difference between the analog and the digital must be done in a mode through which digital textuality can emerge on its own terms.13 To that end, this essay proposes a theory of practice for hypertext by articulating its form and aspect of performance, a performance that functions to separate the digital from the analog.
My task in this article is thus to articulate a mode of understanding hypertext in terms of two components of performance: that of the user and that of the system. The latter suggests the processing done by the computer, which itself performs or is even performative, and the former suggests the performance of the user who operates as a functioning mechanism in the text, an idea whose genealogy includes performance art's situation and inclusion of the viewer within its boundaries, as well as the literary theorizations of the reader in terms of interaction, encounter, agonistic struggle, dialogue, and experience.
Complexity, in my analysis, is not a substitutive metaphor for collage but an inherent part of the system of hypertext itself. In this sense, it speaks to the liminal moment we inhabit between the consideration of hypertext as a genre, in terms of its formal and stylistic properties, and the consideration of new computer and scientific technologies and ideas, both as they are incorporated into electronic writing and as artifacts that themselves have effects and properties, such as autonomous behavior, that are inherent to the system of hypertext.
Different media produce different readers, different reading environments, and different reading practices.