Tag Archives: digital literature

Final Project Proposal

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This project examines how the understanding of literature is changing in the digital age by analyzing memes as a possible new form of digital literature. My thesis is that memes function as a new form of digital literature because they replace linear narrative structures with collective, visual, and participatory meaning production.

The aim of the project is to explore the cultural and cognitive shift from print-based to digital media and to ask what still counts as “literature” in the digital context. I would also like to explore to what extent memes can be compared to books in terms of information transmission. While text is based on language, structure, and argumentation, memes work with images, emotions, and shared digital references.

As a creative project, I would like to create two pages that each deal with the same topic. The first page is more traditional, a standard book page. Instead of an informational text, the second page contains a collection of various memes that report on the same topic. By comparing two forms of presentation of the same topic, on the one hand as traditional text and on the other as a collection of memes, I want to show how the structure, form, and interactivity of digital media change the way meaning is created, communicated, and understood.

Furthermore, I want to show that the transition from print to digital media is not only a technical change, but also a cultural one. Young people today spend a large part of their time with digital content, especially memes, while books are becoming less important for many. Memes are therefore an integral part of our everyday culture and shape how young people think, communicate, and absorb information. Nevertheless, they have hardly been seriously studied in literary and media studies to date.

Evolutionary Media: In the Digital Age

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As someone who knew what they loved(books) from a very young age, my relationship with its concept and physicality has gone through many changes. None so drastic as what I feel today. When I was younger, I was read bedtime stories when I would be tired, and I would have story-times in class where we’d all sit on the carpet and listen to the teacher read. If I was feeling brave, I would look at a monster book I vividly remember having and quite boldly purchasing at a school book fair one year. As I grew older, the texts got a bit thicker, smaller even. I would read for fun while simultaneously read for school. I remember having large hardcover school textbooks on core subjects like History, Science, and English. Then the author’s became important around late middle school and definitely high school. Canonical writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Steinbeck flooded my brain with their words and characters. And it was sometime in my late high school years that I listened to my first audiobook.

Just like how Professor Pressman states in her article, “In order to read Between Page and Screen, you must take, quite literally, a material turn. You must shift away from the traditional posture of holding a book and reading the text printed upon its pages.”, I too had to reorient myself to how I interacted with reading. Now I was listening to someone else’s voice reading the book. Sure, it was similar to the orality of being read to when little, but now there is no focal point. The voice is in my speakers or headphones, not in front of me. My hands weren’t preoccupied and anticipating to turn the page or use my pointer finger as a guide. I had a harder time focusing yet it made all the more sense to just simply use an audiobook. Or at least that’s how it felt when I gifted someone a physical book and they replied to me saying, “I only listen to audiobooks now.”

Now, you have easy access and purchase power to let’s say a text that you would find in a bookstore, right on your phone. And the phone would mimic turning the page, highlighting function etc…Furthermore, hypertexts like Marino’s story now force the reader to engage with the text but specifically through marginalia and the journey doesn’t have to be linear if you don’t want it to be. Texts, along with technology, our changing our literary landscape in drastic ways. And lastly as aforementioned Borsuk’s Between Page and Screen is a digital text that can only be read or rather translated through the eyes of technology. You engage with the text, almost working alongside it, by pointing the book towards the lens and watching the text come to life and float in front of your screen. It is a fascinating thing to not only experience but to be aware that we are in the midst of a great shift in the way we interact with media and literature; books are evolving, literature is augmenting itself, and we are guiding this change in the Digital Age.

Why Digital Literature Scares Me

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I’ve been a writer for a very long time. In many ways I think I can tie this back to the murder of my father as a child, sifting through his things, what he collected, what he wore, for years trying to piece the clues together to make sense of who the man was who I hardly ever knew. It led to an obsession with permanence. What are we when we’re gone apart from the things we leave behind? So I write in a kind of vain attempt at immortality. At its very best it is a noble effort to endure, at its worse it is nothing but pure vanity, of thinking one might matter enough to be spoken of far into the future.

What frightens me the most about digital literature is the knowledge that these things are ephemeral. As Doctor Pressman says in her introduction to electronic literature, sometimes we have “only seven years of access to these works,” a far cry from the tens, hundreds, and in some cases thousands, of years of access we have had to the works of literature we all have grown up with. My favorite novel is nearly ninety years old–the book I did a biography on for the midterm was first written in the thirteenth century. When writers write they write to stay. Writing has always, in some form, been a struggle against time. To record one’s thoughts and the mechanics of one’s mind takes those things from fleeting to enduring.

The three Ps of e-lit are poetics, critical practice, and preservation. “Facade” was created on a version of the web that no longer exists. Caitlin Fisher’s “Circle” plays with ephemerality in its core concept. I think it is admirable, and quite Zen, for artists to create without the impression of any permanence in their work, but what does that mean? I believe it goes against the very nature of being human, to me. It is to allow for death, to celebrate it, to accept it.

I have known very many men who have spoken of accepting the end, of being at peace with it, but when the end came I believe rather firmly that all of them realized they had been liars. And it is far different for a man with a rifle in his hands to wave away life with a flick of the wrist when they are willingly gambling with it than for someone who creates, whether to commune with the masses or in cathartic process, to accept that what they have done is of no meaning to anyone but the artist themselves. If it is true then it is admirable. But I cannot understand it. It is a complete and total submission to time and its forward progress, and to think of it makes me feel incredibly small and powerless, like standing in a field of ever-receding black, vanishing and vanishing in every direction all around you.

Seven years of access? I have blinked once and seven years passed. And to look back I often return to things I have written or things I have created. If they were not there how would I have any measure of who I ever was or how I became whoever I would be?

Maybe I am harping on some age-old fear. I know I am. But I know this because when those fears were expressed people wrote about them; people conveyed the fears in mediums that were enduring. We can look back at the historical record, and we can find them. We can trace where we once were, how we came through to the other side. What does it do to us, as a society, as mankind, if there is nothing to trace? We are floating, and maybe we always have been, but I do not know how to accept it.

Week 10: Electronic literature

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When reading about Electronic literature, I was intrigued with the way it developed over time. When the term was first created it was in reference to literature that was stored online, and now electronic literature refers more to hypertext fiction. I thought this was an interesting development, one I had never thought or known about before: I know nothing about electronic literature. Referencing back to Professor Pressman’s lecture about electronic lit and patchwork girl, she distinguished the differences between the two as Patchwork girl has hypertext. This new era of electronic literature and hypertext has created more interactive work and pieces of Fiction. To me, a hypertext sounds complicated and annoying to navigate, but I also find it so interesting and creative that people are able to create cohesive fiction with hypertext. It is for sure a certain aesthetic of creative work and writing, one some might have a harder time with, but I do find it very interesting how this works as a concept and how digital literature has developed over the years. “We encounter electronic literature as both a reading experience and an application, an artifact that may also encompass the tool used to produce it.” (Rettburg 3) So basically the creator of a hypertext or digital work is also a viewer and a reader at the same time, the idea of intermedia. This is an interesting context of digital media: the viewer and the reader might be having the same experience because aren’t you doing both at the same time? I found the reading “Electronic Literature” interesting in this context and it has made me think more about how I real electronic literature versus a physical book or text.

This type of literature is experimental literature, but I also think that all literature is experimental. What even separates the two? I guess format and guidelines, formal literary devices and context. But I think its interesting to think about electronic lit in this context. It lacks the normal infastructure of what literature usually is. But E-lit does create more of an experimental state unlike other forms of lit. This text mainly got me thinking about our discussion on Thursday with the modernists. They were experimenting with form and content, much like hypertext in digital lit. You can’t separate form and content with digital literature, much like what this text was saying. The tools of something effects its content, which we see with e-lit and hypertexts. Overall, a lot of thoughts abut this reading and electronic lit in general: but I think it is so interesting and I am excited to learn more!