In this essay, Davin Heckman discusses the impact of technical change on the field of criticism in electronic literature and the digital arts. Heckman discusses the challenges speed poses for critical discourse and discusses some of the ways that critical database projects can serve to promote criticism that, in the words of Matthew Arnold, is “sincere, simple, flexible, ardent, ever widening its knowledge.”
This paper will discuss the relationship between speed and literary criticism in the age of new media. Specifically, this paper will explore the dual metaphor of the “tag” as an official consumer label and an underground art form, and the productive tension that exists when both forms exist within the same urban space. Using this metaphor to discuss traditional terminologies and folksonomy as forms of “tagging” that can create productive tension within database projects like the Electronic Literature Directory, I will conclude with a call for attentiveness that can push both casual readers and conservative scholars towards criticism that is technologically appropriate, ethically engaged, and culturally vital.
(Source: author's abstract)