social

When the contemporary pedestrian travels from home to work, campus, or coffee shop wearing earphones and listening to a mobile device, he is not trying to find silent refuge from the noise of modern life, rather, he is striving to replace one sonic overwhelm with another of his own choosing. Sound is unique in its ease of subversion and the degree of experiential immersion that can be achieved through such an act. The nature of listening that the author will discuss is one that by way of design takes the quotidian act of mobile listening to a much more structured level of auditory experience with the hope of eliciting an event that is both multi-sensory and potent. 

As defined by Adriana de Souza de Silva, hybrid space is characterized as “social spaces created by the combination of physical space with digital information and the mobility of user equipped with location-aware interfaces.” (DeSouza 2006: 179) While this definition explicitly defines hybrid space as one that requires location aware technology, the author will explore a broader definition of the term that explores the notions of space, place, private public space, and virtual embodiment. While his exploration of hybrid space is concerned with the split between the real and the virtual, dynamic hybrid space introduces observations of the ways in which temporality exerts a very strong influence upon the experience. 

The creative work of the author, with locative listening, has involved GPS-enabled storytelling (Strathroy Stories, The CHEZ) as well as QR Code-activated listening experiences (The Other Side of OZ) and has raised questions about the potency of this type of listening as not only entertainment and heritage/archival documentation, but also as pieces of virtual embodiment and performative listening.

The central objective of this paper is to provide a new conceptual theoretical framework starting from the role of new new media in shaping a new kind of literature, which I call Cosmo-Literature. Towards this, I start working from Levinson’s differentiation among old media, new media, and new new media to arrive at the difference among the variable types of media. Next, I address the role of new new media in establishing world democracies and changing the social, cultural, and political world map. After that, I investigate the terms of “global village” and “cosmopolitanism” in relation to literature. To clarify what I mean by Cosmo Literature, I will investigate two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel by the Moroccan novelist Abdel-Wahid Stitu, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel by Neil Gaiman, to infer the characteristics of Cosmo literature in general and Cosmo narration in particular.
What I mean by Cosmo-literature is all forms of literature produced by the capabilities provided by new new media. These include digital works but also examples where the digital artifact is printed or presented in other media.
Cosmo literature is derived from the political, social, and cultural context that the whole world lives in nowadays. Appiah’s cosmopolitanism as “universality plus difference” is the most significant term to refer to the pluralistic and universal society of today. Respecting diversity, caring about each other, and kindness are the moral principle of the cosmopolitan society according to Appiah. My project builds on Appiah to argue that digital media facilitate the cultural co-existence of the peoples of the cosmopolitan society. As long as such a society has its own morals and identity, it is logical to have its own literature, which I believe to be Cosmo-Literature.
The investigation of two new new media novels: Only One Millimeter Away, an Arabic Facebook novel, and Hearts, Keys and Puppetry an English Twitter novel, has shown many features of Cosmo-Literature in its relation to cosmopolitanism. At the heart of these features are interactivity, multilingualism, multimediality, suspense, new literariness, blurring the boundaries between the real and the fictional, and creating new dimensions of time. Those features also play as the characteristic features of the group identity of the universal society of today.

Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man is a 1964 book by Marshall McLuhan, a pioneering study in media theory. McLuhan proposes that the media, not the content that they carry, should be the focus of study. He suggests that the medium affects the society in which it plays a role not by the content delivered through it, but by the characteristics of the medium. McLuhan pointed to the light bulb as an example. A light bulb does not have content in the way that a newspaper has articles or a television has programs, yet it is a medium that has a social effect; that is, a light bulb enables people to create spaces during nighttime that would otherwise be enveloped by darkness. He describes the light bulb as a medium without any content. McLuhan states that "a light bulb creates an environment by its mere presence." More controversially, he postulated that content had little effect on society — in other words, it did not matter if television broadcasts children's shows or violent programming, to illustrate one example — the effect of television on society would be identical. He noted that all media have characteristics that engage the viewer in different ways; for instance, a passage in a book could be reread at will, but a movie had to be screened again in its entirety to study any individual part of it. The book is the source of the well-known phrase "The medium is the message". It was a leading indicator of the upheaval of local cultures by increasingly globalized values. The book greatly influenced academics, writers, and social theorists.

These days, commonplaces are repeated about contemporary literatures: new readers, new ways of reading, globalization, etc., because we are witnessing a global change in the way of leaving and interacting, an unprecedented acceleration of the circulation of products and materials, of people, texts and memories that make us learn and look into the world in a different way. The national and global imaginaries coexist and are producing literatures, but, in fact, we do not find enough contrasted experiences and studies that show us how these two imaginaries are working together. It is time for us to ask whether interrelations between global, regional, national, social, generational, sexual memories are modifying the patterns of production and consumption of reading of digital literatures in a very particular way and, in this case, it is also time to change the way in which we approach the text and the way we teach and learn literature. In the frame of the experiences and the research that our Research Group (Leethi) has developed on rituals for e-readings and strategies to read e-literatures and focusing on e-Literature written in Spanish, we will try to answer to these questions: - Concerning the extension and multiplication of media, Is this really modifying local, digital, literary production? Then, do they really exist local, rooted, national literary productions? How does it work with e-productions when the text goes beyond the language? - About our space in the Internet, do they exist national borders? How do readers need to carry across them to enter a global arena through mass media, social networks, blogs, video-games, virtual repositories, etc., to read digital literatures? It is the language the new boundary for readers? - What connective structures are activated to read e-literatures? Which one is the new global imaginary that let us read and understand transcultural productions? Is it related to science, networks or videogames? Which are the new cultural icons? Is there any kind of global memory which e-literatures are contributing to produce? - How could e-Literature help us as teachers to wide the view of our students and to show them a transnational world? In this contribution, we will try to ask to some of these questions by studying some very concrete hispanophone examples of e-literatures in which we could find signs of all these items.