digital age

Anton Ferret, author of the E-Lit work The Fugue* book, will present a reflection on the technological and creative part of it, all that can be done well working with platforms and taking advantage of their own intrusion into the data and all that it means to lose it by the cultural and technological change that has meant the greater awareness for privacy. Oreto Doménech, a researcher in digital literature, will focus on the reception: on how this literary work reconfigures the platforms through which it’s expressed and on how fiction itself uses the platforms to build a metadiscursive reflection on the literature inserted in the historical and social fact.The Fugue* book (ELC II; 2008) turns the reader into the author and protagonist of the same story he is reading and his real-life friends turn into fictional characters. Both obsessively harass him in a violent, sensual plot: with crimes, envy (including literary one), false attributions of authorship and bitter disputes in forums and social networks. Technically, the work is based on the idea of remixing and "mashup" and integrates elements as diverse as the Facebook APIs, applications in PHP and Javascript languages, automatic emails, PDF self-generation or speech synthesis. You can see a video of the work (https://youtu.be/m4UW5uo_H4M) which cannot be read right now due to the obsolescence of the Adoble Flash software.Technologies and platforms in this work are related to creation, not to edition or distribution, which supposes main problems and diverse derivatives of the technologies, like the need of continuous technological update, costs, dependence on the work to the availability of the technology and of the platforms, like for example, to other people's conditions, subjection to technological evolution of the platforms and the introduction of third parties, the big platforms, in the very heart of the works. This literary fiction is constructed with interaction, multimedia, language technologies, data obtained from the Internet and data provided by the reader, ingredients all of which involve well-known and used technologies and platforms.However, the reading pact that introduces us to fiction, reconfigures these platforms along different reading paths. The use of the wide range of platforms builds the plausibility of the stories and ironically places them at the center of the digital landscape in a critical review of the platforms themselves. The theme is distilled, refined, and focuses on the dehumanization of relationships between people, the text-context relationship, public and private space, the real self and masks (authorship, deception and plagiarism), gender literary texts and their analogy with the types of platforms… Texts and spaces related to a communicative situation completely out of literary creation make it possible for all these fragments to function as parts of a single literary narrative.Reading The Fugue* book is an intelligent, amusing and critical experience, with the subtle background of the complexity of the human being able to create (the) networks with words. When digital accelerates the hybridization of the arts, only the centrality of the word defines literature.

(Source: Authors' own abstract)

This thesis extrapolates electronic literature’s différance, proposing an ontology of the form through critical inspection of its traits and peculiarities. Rather than offering a prescriptive definition of electronic literature, this thesis takes an ontological approach through descriptive exploration. In essence, my approach is anti-essentialist, in that I dismiss the view that electronic literature has a specific set of attributes. As will be explored throughout, there are aesthetic properties which frequently emerge, but the implication of their presence remains transient, to the point where electronic literature cannot be one thing, for to be so, it could not be literary. Computational aesthetics resist stable definition, so if we are to achieve an understanding of what separates electronic literature – if it is indeed, separate – from its non-digital counterparts, then we must do so through an articulation of those differences which may, at first, be less apparent. It is an impossibility to state what electronic literature is, as in doing so, one is oblivious to what it might become. The heightened relationship between form and content encountered in this field means that electronic literature is continuously in flux. Literature, while equally resistant to definition, is at least recognisable to our faculties. As readers, we have long possessed the sensibilities necessary to discern the literary from the communicative. Non-digital literary content is open to evolution and experimentation, but predominantly, with a few exceptions, its paratextual form remains consistent. Electronic literature’s content is open to the same artistic manipulation as the physical, but its form too, symbiotically attached to the exponential rate of technological change, gives rise to phenomenological disruption. As multimodal aesthetics challenge our ability to perceive the literary, we should abandon our attempts at defining the relevant works, and instead, seek understanding through analyses of the means by which they differ, and of how they defer, from the literatures that have both preceded and characterised the digital age. This thesis does not seek to resolve the aporetic, but rather, demonstrates how we must extract our theories of the digital out of observation and analysis, as opposed to speculation. This is not to say that my peers are necessarily wrong; I will be in agreement with many of them on a number of matters. My purpose, rather, is to offer some synthesis to a field comprised of a multiplicity of divergent views. Throughout the process of presenting this notion of a new modernity, and offering synthesis to the theories that have emerged from this epoch, I will offer fresh insights and novel approaches to the literary practices of the digital age. In doing so, my purpose will be to contribute to the progression of a consistent and legitimate digital poetics by showing that it cannot be one thing, but a balance of forces – a poetics of equipoise.

This innovative reader addresses the social, cultural, political, and educational implications of today’s burgeoning information and communication technologies in substantial critical depth. Using three broad human themes—Constructing Identity, Building Community, and Seeking Knowledge—this brief freshman reader engages students in exciting rhetorical issues, including "Gender Online," "The Global Village," and "Information Overload and New Media." In each case, hopeful and optimistic views are balanced with incisive technology criticism, helping to make cutting-edge social issues intellectually coherent and accessible to your students.

Source: www.amazon.de

This essay is a hypothesis with focus on the generational shift from deep attention, towards hyper attention in cognitive modes. Deep attention is a cognitive mode witch will allow you to focus long term, problemsolving, analyzing etc. Reading a long novella, solving a mathproblem. Hyper attention is the cognitive mode where you multitask, lots of minor tasks at once, as in playing a videogame, using social media, etc. In this mode your focus has a short timeline and tends to affect your attention span conserning long time problemsolving.
The article discusses the educational preparedness in the future, when this problem is likely to affect us. As a society the problem of this generational shift has already started to show itself,
but the educational system need to prepare for the changes that will arise, when todays 10 year olds enter the area of higher education. It is suggested that being prepared could be to use new pedagogical models, that provide greater stimulation than the typical classrom.
The author concludes that the two cognitive modes are and should be side by side, and that educators has a responsibility to adapt to the changes that are surfacing now, and to the changes that will only increase in the years ahead.

Video games have been a central feature of the cultural landscape for over twenty years and now rival older media like movies, television, and music in popularity and cultural influence. Yet there have been relatively few attempts to understand the video game as an independent medium. Most such efforts focus on the earliest generation of text-based adventures (Zork, for example) and have little to say about such visually and conceptually sophisticated games as Final Fantasy X, Shenmue, Grand Theft Auto, Halo, and The Sims, in which players inhabit elaborately detailed worlds and manipulate digital avatars with a vast—and in some cases, almost unlimited—array of actions and choices. In Gaming, Alexander Galloway instead considers the video game as a distinct cultural form that demands a new and unique interpretive framework. Drawing on a wide range of disciplines, particularly critical theory and media studies, he analyzes video games as something to be played rather than as texts to be read, and traces in five concise chapters how the “algorithmic culture” created by video games intersects with theories of visuality, realism, allegory, and the avant-garde. If photographs are images and films are moving images, then, Galloway asserts, video games are best defined as actions. Using examples from more than fifty video games, Galloway constructs a classification system of action in video games, incorporating standard elements of gameplay as well as software crashes, network lags, and the use of cheats and game hacks. In subsequent chapters, he explores the overlap between the conventions of film and video games, the political and cultural implications of gaming practices, the visual environment of video games, and the status of games as an emerging cultural form. Together, these essays offer a new conception of gaming and, more broadly, of electronic culture as a whole, one that celebrates and does not lament the qualities of the digital age. (Source: https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/gaming)

In his essay ‘Ego’ (2013), Frank Schirrmacher describes how, by means of a digitalized global marketing strategy, a virtual double of the human subject is installed: the subject as agent or player in the market, represented in data collections and rendered predictable in game-theoretical data analysis. Game theory has failed to predict the behavior of real-world people; yet, in their virtual second existence, the subject is forced into a game-theoretical predictability. In recent big data technology, the subject’s double (or “number two”, as Schirrmacher calls it) is becoming more and more powerful, with nearly every action of a person immediately becoming an action embedded in the big game of the virtual market – a market that in turn becomes more and more game-theoretical in its ways of functioning.
In my talk, I will use Schirrmacher’s radical view as a heuristic starting point for examining the temporal dimension of both digitalization and financialization in the early 21st century. The timing of the markets has changed drastically – as much an effect of the digital revolution as of the shift from revenue to shareholder value, and from stock exchange to derivatives trading. When Benjamin Franklin posited that “Time is Money”, capitalism was still focused on both the productive labor of workers and the future outcomes of human planning (the logic of investments); today’s economy, defined by both financialization and digitalization, instead focuses on acts of decision making – acts on which game theory focuses as well. Indeed, what in entrepreneurial investment is about future opportunities, is decided upon in the present in a financialized market. The future is thereby left in the aggregate state of its mere virtuality. Meanwhile, as Schirrmacher describes, big data economy reduces human agents into the game-theoretical homo oeconomicus, technology reduces the time employed in the act of decision making at the stock and bond markets to the millisecond of a transaction. In short: Time is no longer money – timing is.
At the same time, the market turns away from human invention to embrace machinic prediction. The temporality produced by capitalism – which once held the utopian dimension of investment (modeling a future, then trying to build it) – morphs into a financialized temporality of mere decision making (predicting risks and trying to handle them). The ‘humanist’ dimension of capitalism is thereby lost, with capitalist markets eliminating human inventiveness from the scene in favor of the ‘developers’ of ever-more sophisticated data machines. Ultimately, the future ceases to be something to be built by humans; it instead becoming something whose eventualities have to be predicted by machines. Financialization therefore is perhaps the most important (albeit less considered) of the numerous agents propelling a post-humanist future.

(Source: Author's Abstract)

My presentation will discuss the use of information and social networking software in electronic writing with the aim of identifying and analyzing several important new directions in literary criticism in the digital era. As I argue, one of the most significant pedagogical outcomes of media convergence within the literary arts centres upon criticism’s necessary de-emphasis of traditional genre-based modes of analysis and assessment. While digital works may resemble, perhaps even aesthetically mimic, the various analogue formats upon which they are based, both the qualitative and quantitative distinctions between texts, audio and image-based forms remain conceptual, not actual. Subsequently, the primary interpretative paradigms for all forms of digital cultural production tend to emerge via spatially accrued tensions and patterns between the work and its literal location within an information network. To acquire meaning, to be, in other words, rationally interpretable, digital works depend upon some kind of placement within larger constellations of interrelated, inter-functioning data systems. New methods of literary criticism, it follows, must inevitably derive from careful consideration of such networks and their capacity to influence and authorise how texts appear as works of coherence and argument. To this end, I will exhibit several possible architectural plans for the design and construction of new media resource systems able to employ advanced semantic technologies for the interpretation and/or construction of meaning within texts. My argument will consider the possibility whether such systems are not only useful in the interpretation of digital writing, but necessary. Work and research I have recently completed towards implementing a full media lab for the Digital Humanities program at Capilano College will serve as an example of the type of critical tools and methods upon which the field of literary criticism may increasingly depend. Such systems, I suggest, not only help organise digital writing for the purpose of critical study and analysis, their very structure implies a completely new concept of literary meaning in itself, one in which a text's cultural significance and function remains essentially indeterminate, save for its relationship to different interpretative semantic networks. In this way, contexts of meaning and interpretation, regardless of the field of knowledge must, in themselves, be recast and reconsidered as dynamic, network driven structures rather than static archives of related texts.

(Source: Author's abstract, 2008 ELO Conference site)