Tag Archives: Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality

Digital Literature – A Quiet Collaboration

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Reading Scott Rettberg’s text on electronic literature, one line in particular really stuck with me. “What is really meant by ‘electronic literature’ is that the computer (or the network context) is in some way essential to the performance or carrying out of the literary activity in question” (p. 169). At first, it sounds very technical, like something you would read in a definition. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense and give me a new perspective on how I see writing. Usually, the computer feels like background noise. A tool that quietly does what we tell it to. We type, it records. Simple. But Rettberg’s line flips that. It suggests that the computer is not simply the surface where writing appears. It is part of how writing happens.

That shift feels small, but it is huge. It means the computer is not just a container for words. It is a participant in them. The text depends on it. Its speed, its memory, even its glitches. The poem or story does not just sit there waiting to be read. It moves, reacts, performs. In a sense, it breathes through code. I like how this idea makes the act of writing feel less lonely. The computer becomes a quiet collaborator. Every click, every pause, every bit of code is part of the exchange. It makes me think that writing on a computer has always been a kind of dialogue, we just didn’t notice it. Maybe we never really wrote on machines, but have been writing with them all along.

Rettberg says that electronic literature “takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer”. (169) That line makes me think about how the machine brings its own possibilities like light, sound, movement, randomness. It adds time to text. Suddenly, literature isn’t something still, but something that happens. You don’t just read it, you watch it unfold. And that brings a strange kind of intimacy. When the computer becomes part of the writing, it also becomes part of us. The screen holds not just our words, but our gestures, our rhythms, the small hesitations between thoughts. It feels less like using a tool and more like sharing a process.

Maybe that’s what Rettberg’s essay leaves behind. The sense that writing and technology aren’t opposites. They have always been connected and electronic literature just makes that visible. It reminds us that meaning isn’t only made by what we write, but by what responds. The page, the screen, the machine that starts to write back.

Not the Old or the New but the Old and the New.

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I have reflected on how “old” media has influenced the shape and creation of “new” media, but I have never actively considered how the new reframes our thinking and perspective on the old. In, Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media and Textuality, Pressman presents comparisons from other scholars on how old media might be analyzed through our understanding and use of our current media and technology. The postal service America’s Antebellum period is defined as a “precursor to our contemporary digital social network,” these two medias are not sperate, but related to each other in both directions, the postal service is like the social network, and the social network is like the postal service. Old media is not just what came before the new, but also an actual previous version of it. This illustrates how current new media and technology has always been desired and in development, however its previous iterations have had to be created before it.

New media is not necessarily just new, but newer, I think of it like a software update, Media 2.0. New media is not a complete reinvention of the old, but growth upon it that creates a large network of interconnected and related devices that have sprung from each other. The comparison between what is old and what is newer can of course be applied to objects outside media, a NEW iPhone when compared to its previous generations is not new, just newer, a person would not be lost on how to use a new phone, because they are familiar with the old one and vise versa, just as a person would likely quickly realize how to use and view old or new media based on their familiarity with one or the other.