notes on the future of writing and reading

We began this semester talking about the print book as a form of reading technology. We end the semester reflecting on the fate of the print book in a digital world. Critics have been predicting the death of the print book for some time. At the dawn of the World Wide Web in 1992, hypertext author Robert Coover boldly declared the end of books in the New York Times. His prediction was premature. An obituary for hypertext fiction would have been more apropos.

But it isn’t just books that we should be worried about. It’s the fate of writing and reading that should concern us. In terms of digital communications, we seem to be moving away from textuality and towards visuality. That is, people increasingly communicate with each other using applications that are more visual than textual. Video chat at Skype is just one example of this; in the near future, such applications will become commonplace and communicating by writing will no doubt decrease. This is even more true of the applications we use to entertain ourselves. We are more likely to view video than to read an article online. Games are less reliant on writing text and are increasingly immersive due to improvements in visual simulation.

The question then is: will we still be writing and reading 50 years from now?

The National Endowment for the Arts would seem to think no. In fact, based on a 2004 NEA study entitled “To Read or Not to Read,” they seem to be panicking, accusing digital applications for a large decline in reading, which they envision continuing until there is no one left who can read or write.

The report has a summary. What I offer here is a summary of their summary.

1. Americans are reading less

• adults and young adults reading less books
• reading declining amidst teens
• college students read less (for PLEASURE)
• young people reading less literature
• reading print competes with other media
• spending on books dropping

2. Americans are reading less well

• reading scores for 17 year olds down
• reading scores for high school seniors down
• reading proficiency rates stagnant or declining for adults
• reading for pleasure correlates with academic achievement

3. Social costs of reading decline

• employers rank reading and writing as top deficiencies
• good readers generally have more financially rewarding jobs
• less advanced readers report fewer opportunies for career growth
• good readers contribute to cultural and civic life
• “good readers make good citizens” (voting, etc.)
• deficient reading tied to drop out rate
• deficient readers more likely to be unemployed
• deficient readers more likely to be criminals

4. Summary of findings

• Less reading for pleasure in late adolescence than in younger age groups
• Declines in reading test scores among 17-year-olds and high school seniors in contrast to younger age groups and lower grade levels
• Among high school seniors, a wider rift in the reading scores of advanced and deficient readers
• A male-female gap in reading proclivity and achievement levels
• A sharp divide in the reading skills of incarcerated adults versus non-prisoners
• Greater academic, professional, and civic benefits associated with high levels of leisure reading and reading comprehension

You may have noticed some problems with the report; I know I did.  For instance, you can replace “poor people” for “deficient readers” and get similar results. That is, it might be poverty rather than a lack of reading that is the main problem in the decline of reading. Also, the report equates reading with literature. It is possible that people read much more than they used to, but not works narrowly defined as literature. Also, the report equates reading with print. Again, it is possible that people read more, but what they read is electronic rather than print.

The point about (non digital) readers being better citizens is particularly egregious given the last U.S. presidential election, in 2008, in which Barack Obama mobilized people via the internet and the Web to an unprecedented degree. Digital technology has made many people more active in politics and civic life, rather than less, as the NEA report claims. (Not to mention all the people in North Africa and the Middle East right now who are using Web 2.0 digital media such as blogs, Facebook, and Twitter to organize and transform their societies).

Matthew Kirschenbaum, a professor at the University of Maryland (and author of one of our first assigned readings), gives an eloquent rebuttal to the NEA report in an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education.

In terms of the future of literary reading and writing, we can dwell on the negatives, like the NEA. But there are other reputable critics and scholars who do not think that people are becoming cretins because of their use of digital technologies. For instance: Robert Darnton, who is a print culture scholar, and thus very invested with print and books, but someone who also acknowledges the benefits of the digital, in his article “The Library in the New Age (2008).” While he notes some of the downside of migrating writing and reading from print to the digital world, he is also fairly confident that print works will continue to be read and used in our digital world. More specifically, he thinks “brick and mortar” libraries will continue to play a vital role in society.

His article is basically a review of Google Books, which is digitizing entire libraries as part of an effort to digitize all human knowledge found in print. In his article Darnton declares his main point: “I want to argue that every age was an age of information, each in its own way, and that information has always been unstable.”

This is of course very true of the current state of digitized information. But what is changing is not just the material manifestation of information, in print, but also our ways of thinking about information. Basically, the digital revolution is making us not worse, but different, readers. And in fact, digitization of information encourages us to read more critically:

I would argue that the new information technology should force us to rethink the notion of information itself. It should not be understood as if it took the form of hard facts or nuggets of reality ready to be quarried out of newspapers, archives, and libraries, but rather as messages that are constantly being reshaped in the process of transmission. Instead of firmly fixed documents, we must deal with multiple, mutable texts. By studying them skeptically on our computer screens, we can learn how to read our daily newspaper more effectively—and even how to appreciate old books.

Darnton goes on to show how every form of communication, beginning with writing, is unstable and unreliable. The way to deal with this is to preserve as many copies as possible. That is why, for Darnton, libraries are so important.

He begins his article summarizing the four big breakthroughs in communications technologies.

1. Writing. “the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind’s relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history.”

2. Scroll to codex. “The second technological shift [is] when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. . . It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader’s aids.”

3. Moveable type. “The codex, in turn, was transformed by the invention of printing with movable type in the 1450s. Gutenberg’s invention . . . spread like wildfire, bringing the book within the reach of ever-widening circles of readers. The technology of printing did not change for nearly four centuries, but the reading public grew larger and larger, thanks to improvements in literacy, education, and access to the printed word.”

4. Electronic communications: “The Internet dates from 1974, at least as a term. It developed from ARPANET, which went back to 1969, and from earlier experiments in communication among networks of computers. The Web began as a means of communication among physicists in 1981. Web sites and search engines became common in the mid-1990s.”

What Darnton implies is that we’ve had momentous changes in writing and reading technologies before, and none of them turned people into illiterates, despite the fears of critics (in fact, they were all responsible for large increases in literacy). However, Darnton returns to his point that information is unstable and needs to be preserved. The reason that “brick and mortar” libraries will continue to be important is that digital communications, because of the huge volume of digital information and the rapid changes allowed by digital technology, are particularly unstable.

Here, summarized, are Darnton’s eight reasons why we will continue to need libraries:

1. Google won’t be able to replicate every book in every library. Even within editions of print books, there are important variants, which means that one copy is not enough.

2. Many collections are excluded from the Google Books digitization effort. Google has signed on quite a few libraries, but even Google can’t expect to get every library to participate.

3. Copyright keeps some books from getting fully digitized. All books published since 1923 are in copyright based on the formula: the life of the author + 70 years. Those who benefit from this copyright structure, authors and publishers, fear people will be able to download their books for free. That is why they have sued Google.

4. Digital technology is inherently transient and potentially obsolescent. What this means is that many of the works Google is digitizing may be inaccessible in the future due to changes in storage technology. This has given rise to a whole new field, digital forensics, which attempts to not only preserve documents but also the software and hardware needed to read those documents in the formats in which they were originally created. Maryland’s Matthew Kirschenbaum, mentioned above, is a major thinker in this field. See his Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination (2008).

5. Google makes mistakes. Even a casual perusal of Google books will make this clear. Scholars are constantly complaining about these mistakes, many of which are due to OCR (optical character recognition) scanning.

6. Even digital copies become degraded or corrupted over time. What happens when your digital file is no longer accessible? You go to the library and find a print copy to copy or scan.

7. Searching technology makes some books hard to find, and doesn’t give us all variants. This will no doubt improve over time, but the sheer volume of new “born digital” works, added to digitized print works, will always mean that some books will get lost in the data deluge.

8. Digital applications cannot replace physical act of reading material book. This is the strongest argument for book preservation for some people: the physical experience of looking at, touching, even smelling books. This is not something that a Kindle or any electronic reader can reproduce. Darnton puts it this way:

Even if the digitized image on the computer screen is accurate, it will fail to capture crucial aspects of a book. For example, size. The experience of reading a small duodecimo, designed to be held easily in one hand, differs considerably from that of reading a heavy folio propped up on a book stand. It is important to get the feel of a book—the texture of its paper, the quality of its printing, the nature of its binding. Its physical aspects provide clues about its existence as an element in a social and economic system; and if it contains margin notes, it can reveal a great deal about its place in the intellectual life of its readers.

This brings us back to one of the main ideas in this class: media matters. The medium in which a literary work appears affects the way it is read. A book is not a hypertext or a blog or a Facebook entry. Each of these media determine to a large extent how something is said and read. It follows then that in order to preserve the way a literary work is said and read, we need to preserve the medium in which it appears. This does not mean chucking digital media in favor of print. But it does mean preserving the physical book and the places where such books are stored: the library.

Works Cited:

“The End of Books”
Robert Coover
New York Times (June 21, 1992)
http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/370/EndofBooks.htm

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)
“To Read or Not to Read”
http://www.nea.gov/research/ToRead.pdf

“How Reading is Being Re-Imagined”
Matthew Kirschenbaum
Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/How-Reading-Is-Being/17111/

Robert Darnton
“The Library in a New Age”
New York Times
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2008/jun/12/the-library-in-the-new-age/

notes on the canon

According to George Landow, “the American Heritage Dictionary has eleven separate definitions of the term canon, the most relevant of which is ‘an authoritative list, as of the works of an author’ and ‘a basis for judgment; standard; criterion.’”

Both of these senses of “canon” are contained within the definition of the literary canon—those works that have been singled out by critics and audiences to have lasting artistic value. Landow continues:

Belonging to the canon confers status—social, political, economic, aesthetic—none of which can easily be extricated from the others. Belonging to the canon is a guarantee of quality, and that guarantee of high aesthetic quality serves as a promise, a contract, that announces to the viewer, “Here is something to be enjoyed as an aesthetic object. Complex, difficult, privileged, the object before you has been winnowed by the sensitive few and the not-so-sensitive many, and it will repay your attention. You will receive pleasure; at least you’re supposed to, and if you don’t, well, perhaps there’s something off with your apparatus.”

It is clear in the preceding that Landow is somewhat critical of the idea of a literary canon. Though he correctly notes that it is not just critics (“the sensitive few”) but general readers and fans (“the not-so-sensitive many”) who determine what will continue to be read and cherished in the future.

Landow continues:

Works in the canon get read, read by neophyte students and supposedly expert teachers. It also means that to read these privileged works is a privilege and a sign of privilege. It is also a sign that one has been canonized oneself—beatified by the experience of being introduced to beauty, admitted to the ranks of those of the inner circle who are acquainted with the canon and can judge what belongs and does not.

“Privilege” is often a bad word in academia, and this is how Landow uses it. It implies a select few, a cognoscenti, who determine what we read, now and into the future.

There are two important things that need to be emphasized at this point about the canon:

1. Any canon changes over time and space. That is, what is considered canonical at one point in time, and in one place, is different in other times and places. What was canonical in nineteenth-century England is not necessarily canonical today in England, or in the United States. Ever hear of Charles Lamb or his work Essays of Elia? Probably not, but in the nineteenth century every school child or university student in English-speaking countries would have been able to quote Lamb by memory.

2. Canon is as much about exclusion as inclusion. Until recently, women and people of color were not included in the English literary canon. Now they are, due to the diligent efforts of many critics and scholars, both women and men, caucasians and people of color. In fact, the last fifty years, particularly in literature departments, are informally known as the “canon wars” because of the sometimes fierce debate about who should be in the literary canon. Of course, to make space for these women and people of color in the canon, some of the old writers have gotten displaced (see my comment about Charles Lamb above).

For some literary critics, most of what we read this semester would not be considered canonical, just because it is electronic. You would no doubt agree that some of the works we have read do not have much artistic or literary value. But quite a few are quite brilliant and deserve to be read by people in the future. The reason why the subject of the canon has been raised in this class is because we are now re-forming the literary canon to include digital works. Critics will have their favorites, but so too will common readers and, especially, students. When critics and readers eventually agree about a work, that will make it canonical.

All of you are part of this process of canon formation. Particularly in a world in which social networking is so prevalent, your opinions matter and help shape what future students will read in literature courses.

Though we haven’t discussed it much, the revision of the literary canon is at the heart of what is called digital humanities. The humanities more generally refer to the exploration of the human condition in the arts and the social sciences. Digital humanities refers to the application of computer and communications technologies to the work of scholars and teachers working in the arts and social sciences, particularly universities.

The Centre for Humanities Computing at King’s College, London University defines Digital Humanities this way:

The digital humanities comprise the study of what happens at the intersection of computing tools with cultural artefacts of all kinds. This study begins where basic familiarity with standard software ends. It probes how these common tools may be used to make new knowledge from our cultural inheritance and from the contemporary world. It equips students to analyze problems in terms of digital methods, choose those best for the job at hand, apply them creatively and assess the results. It teaches students to use computing as an instrument to investigate how we know what we know, hence to strengthen and extend our knowledge of the world past and present. (taken from the Digital Humanities page at Miami University of Ohio)

It seems likely that there will always be an audience for digital literature in universities. In fact, university students probably comprise the main audience for digital literature, in courses like ENGL278W. This is also true of literature in general: today, it is in school that most people read literature. In this sense, it will be university classes more than anything else that will determine the canon of digital literature.

Finally, we have also encountered the idea of the canon in the context of the canon vs. fanon debate in fan wikis.

In this sense canon is official source material developed by the official author or authors of a given fictional universe. For instance, for the Star Wars universe, this would be primarily George Lucas, but also the screenwriters who worked on screenplays and those who have written the novelizations of the films. elaborations in interviews, blogs, etc.).

Fanon is non-official source material (often filling in gaps in characters and stories in canon) which goes viral, becomes common knowledge in fan circles, and may eventually become canon if the canonical authors recognize it as such. On this page you can read more about the difference between canon and fanon, and some examples of fanon which became canon:

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Fanon

The interesting thing about all this, in terms of this class, is that even fictional universes have a consensus of what is true in that universe, and what is not. That is, a fictional world can have agreed-upon or canonized truths. Meanwhile, unapproved fictions within the fictional world are untrue, or fanon. But when fanon fictions are canonized as canonical truths for a given fictional world. Also important is that, in the case of fan wikis, it is fans who drive the process, not the canonical authors.

Works Cited:

George Landow, “The Literary Canon”
http://www.victorianweb.org/gender/canon/litcan.html

Digital Humanities (Miami University of Ohio)
http://www.units.muohio.edu/technologyandhumanities/field.htm

notes on fact vs. fiction

As we have witnessed and discussed in this class, the line between fact and fiction online is blurry. Some take advantage of this situation in malicious ways: scamming and spamming people, taking over the online identities of strangers in order to steal information and ultimately their money. Some take advantage in order to create art in the form of literature. We have seen numerous examples of such art works this semester.

Let’s look at some examples of the fudging of facts into fiction.

Recently, Stephen Colbert responded to a factual error (to put it charitably) made by Jon Kyl in a speech in the U.S. House of Representatives. As part of a budget debate, Kyl said that “90%” of what Planned Parenthood did was abortions. Checking the public disclosure statements of Planned Parenthood, Colbert discovered that actually only 3% of Planned Parenthood’s budget went to abortion. The rest went to medical care for women.

Kyl later issued a statement saying that what he said about Planned Parenthood was “not intended to be a factual statement.” It was, apparently, intended to be a fiction that looked an awful lot like fact. In other words, a lie.

It was a great example of what Colbert calls “truthiness“: it’s true because someone wants it to be true, based on a personal or political agenda. That is, it’s subjective truth masquerading as objective truth.

Colbert then began a Twitter campaign in which people would say “truthy” things about Jon Kyl in a tweet, and then conclude with #notintendedtobeafactualstatement. This incited all sorts of creative acts of fiction, including yours truly who tweeted (on behalf of his digital literature class):

“Jon Kyle is a cyborg. Which is why he doesn’t understand women’s reproductive health. #NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement”

For more on this, check out these links:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/24039/october-17-2005/the-word—truthiness

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/04/12/colbert-fox-friends_n_847930.html
http://twitter.com/#!/search?q=%23NotIntendedToBeAFactualStatement

Blurring the border between fact and fiction is nothing new in communications or literature. In fact, every big advance in communications usually leads to a period of time in which it is not clear what is fact and what is fiction, which some people use to their advantage for good (art) or ill (scams).

When print was first popular, and literacy expanding, there were many such literary hoaxes. Pamela (1740), by Samuel Richardson, is considered by many as the first novel in English. It was hugely popular and thought at first as a true story. It was something of a literary hoax, in that the novel was based on a letter-writing manual and included a document by a fictional reverend praising the novel, pretending it was real. Richardson’s rival, Henry Fielding, published a parody of Pamela, called Shamela, in which he pokes fun at Richardson’s characters and story, but also attacks Richardson for including the fictional reverend’s puff piece. In doing this, it is also likely that Fielding wanted to make money on the Pamela craze. Fielding later wrote another work using Richardson’s characters.

Like I said, consciously confusing fact and fiction is nothing new.

In this class, we first encountered it when we read Julian Dibble’s “A Rape in Cyberspace.” You’ll recall that Mr. Bungle, the demented clown, simulated rape in a MOO. It turns out that Mr. Bungle was in fact a whole dorm of randy college students. So in this case, we had people who were pretending to be someone they weren’t, for malicious purposes. And the fiction of rape was actually quite a factual experience for the people on the receiving end of Mr. Bungle’s transgressions.

http://www.juliandibbell.com/articles/a-rape-in-cyberspace/

We also looked at fake Facebook profiles and Phweets (phony Twitter feeds). Again, what appeared to be factual in many cases was fiction. And again, some people use this confusion in malicious ways (hacking into profiles in order to get financial information), and others for artistic reasons.

http://www.pcworld.com/article/159492/15_fake_and_funny_twitter_accounts.html

We saw many examples of fake blogs. Some of these “flogs” were fiction blogs, used to create characters and stories, and some were “flack” blogs, blogs that were part of a surreptitious advertising campaign. As an example of the latter there was Jim and Laura and their cross-country trip visiting various Walmarts. It turns out later that they were paid by an advertising company hired by Walmart. In their blog entries, there was no mention of anything bad at Walmart. All that had been edited out by the advertising company.

Another, much more sophisticated, example is the PotatoFools ARG. An ARG is an alternative reality game. On the PotatoFools wiki it is defined thus: “an ARG is an Alternative Reality Game, not augmented but Alternative. It uses a real world context to solve puzzles using a community based group to eventually lead to a bigger goal.” In this case it offered a pseudo-conspiracy in which events and facts were manipulated by people working for an advertising campaign for the soon-to-be-released console game Portal 2.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1824635

The advertising campaign built around Jay Z’s book “Decoded” could probably also be considered a ARG.

http://bing.decodejay-z.com/?fbid=mokr-deCAWw&wom=false

Less tricky and more like literary fiction are the celebrity parody blogs we looked at in class, such as those at newsgroper.com. For instance, there is a celebrity flog by “the Donald,” Donald Trump.

http://www.newsgroper.com/donald-trump

Now we are more likely to see celebrity parody flogs and phweets. For most of these it’s satirical and fun, but, again, when the border between fact and fiction is not clear, it can have more serious implications. For instance, when someone impersonates a political figure, some people might take it seriously, and it can affect domestic policies and geopolitical arrangements. This is especially true, as in the example below, when hackers use celebrity accounts (and accounts of newsmakers) to send out pornography or gather financial information from people.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/26/twitter-phishing-hack-hit_n_477977.html

We’ve also read wikis that willfully confuse fact and fiction. Because anyone can edit wikis, the line between fact and fiction in wikis is always blurry, because there are many opportunities for “truthiness.” This is very true of Wikipedia. For instance, some legislators have their aides edit pages that say less than flattering things about them or their policies. To their credit, Wikipedia editors usually revert these pages fairly quickly, if the legislators are prominent enough. This is why college professors won’t let you cite Wikipedia in papers: it’s quite possible that the entry you cite has a biased perspective, or that it has been edited since you saw it. In this way it lacks authority.

In terms of fiction wikis, there does not seem to be much malicious hacking on wikis. But there are many writers that use wikis artistically, in terms of literature. For instance, there is the Wikipedia parody Uncyclopedia. If you didn’t know better you would think Uncyclopedia and Wikipedia are one in the same. Their similarity in look is a good part of the fun, and the artistry.

http://uncyclopedia.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Then there are fiction wikis that are more complicated, in a good way. The Imagine wiki, in Wikia, is an online encyclopedia for things that don’t exist. This is not a parody but a wiki that allows people to define and describe things that they have invented in their imagination, often as part of a larger fictional project.

http://imagine.wikia.com/wiki/Main_Page

Similarly, there are wikis that try to define what is true in the context of a larger fictional universe. Examples would be Harry Potter wikis, Twilight wikis, and Star Wars wikis (link below). What is true in a given fictional world is considered “canon.” But then there are the versions of the characters and the stories in fan fiction. On many sites, this is called “fanon.” At Wookiepedia, fanon “applies to certain ‘facts’ that may have been accepted as a truth by a large number of fans, although not necessarily true, and thus either replaces an established canonical fact in the minds of those fans, or fills a plot-hole.” In some cases, the canonical authors of a fictional universe will accept fanon assertions, thus making them canonical. The important thing to take from this is that even in fictional worlds, people are concerned about facts and fictions, and try to distinguish what is “truthy” from what is “truth” in that given world.

http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Fanon

Notes on the Database

The database is something we take for granted in our digital world. If it’s digital, it means that is basically is made up of information (a long string of zeros and ones), and information needs to be stored. In the digital world it is stored in files, which are themselves stored in databases, which are often smaller subsets of larger databases, etc. Everything we have studied in this class has had, at its “back end,” a database of some kind. Hypertext, multimedia poems, MOOs, interactive fiction, flogs, and fiction wikis all need some kind of database to function. And in order to read them, you need to use some kind of interface (a program or application).

In The Language of New Media, Lev Manovich defines the database as “a structured collection of data. The data stored in a database is organized for fast search and retrieval by a computer and therefore, it is anything but a simple collection of items. Different types of databases—hierarchical, network, relational, and object-oriented—use different models to organize data” (218).

As mentioned, a large proportion of works of digital literature are databases in a basic sense. “They appear as collections of items on which the user can perform various operations—view, navigate, search.” Particularly online, “the world appears to us as an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records, [so] it is only appropriate that we will be moved to model it as a database” (219). Given that the database is an “endless and unstructured collection” of data, we need an interface to make use of it.

In terms of traditional, print literature, particularly prose, we can consider the print object as a form of database (of words, pages, chapters, etc.). The normal manner of interfacing such a database is the narrative. But in a digital environment, the narrative is a bad interface. It is constantly undermined by the shear amount of data and the many different ways of accessing it.

Manovich writes: “As a cultural form, the database represents the world as a list of items, and it refuses to order this list. In contrast, a narrative creates a cause-and-effect trajectory of seemingly unordered items (events). Therefore, database and narrative are natural enemies. Competing for the same territory of human culture, each claims an exclusive right to make meaning out of the world,” (225). Part of this is that databases are made to be interfaced in different ways, and encourage random access. In contrast, a narrative is a privileged interface, and discourages random access.

Creating a work of digital literature “can be understood as the construction of an interface to a database. In the simplest case, the interface simply provides access to the underlying database.” But it is also possible “to create different interfaces to the same material,” (226-227). In that sense, database and narrative can be collaborators.

That is, although they are “natural enemies,” narrative can still be part of digital literary works. However, instead of being the privileged interface, as in print, narrative is but one interface among others in the digital realm.

In Patchwork Girl Shelley Jackson created many interfaces to her work (indexes, charts, trees) but fails to tell a coherent story. That is because she does not have a unifying narrative as an interface. The result tends to be confusion and disinterest. To be fair, her approach is similar to many artists coming to digital literature from an experimental modernist or post-modernist perspective, including most early hypertext authors.

Some digital authors now speak of the database as a new kind of genre. The name they usually give to this new digital genre is the archive. An archive gives to the reader/user a database of materials (including images, texts, audio and video files) without privileging any of them, allowing the reader/user to access them randomly. However, a good archive will include—along with a good navigation structure—at least one file that functions as a narrative, even if it’s only a “how to” page.

One thing that complicates all this, something Manovich does not really address, is the whole question of poetry. Many, if not most, poems today make no use of narrative. How do we access the “database” of the poem? Through striking images, allusion, rhythm, and the artful and musical use of language, perhaps? Or that certain je ne sai quoi? However you look at it, there are multiple “interfaces” to poetry.

Maybe this is why, as we have observed in this class, poetry seems to translate better to the digital realm than prose—particularly, long works of prose. Lacking a strong, linear narrative, and with multiple ways to access the material, the poem is ready-made to be “ported into” a database. (It doesn’t hurt that poems are often much shorter, both in line and page length.)

It might be helpful to think about database as it relates to the other aspects of digital literature, such as its multimedia, interactive, and immersive qualities.

Multimedia: The database of the digital work offers a variety of objects to view and engage. Print objects offer this as well, with this difference: a multimedia object offers multiple interfaces, rather than just one as in print, including navigation by image (graphical interface, icons, etc.)

Interactive: Offering multiple interfaces to the database of the digital work, the reader (or “user”) has multiple possibilities—multiple paths—for navigating the work. This makes it more interactive. Particular forms of interactivity in play: VIEW, NAVIGATE, SEARCH, and SORT. Each of these offers a different way to interface the data of the digital object. This means that it is the user organizes the material, and creates the narrative on the fly, depending upon the choices made.

Immersive: Digital objects “seek the real by multiplying mediation so as to create a feeling of fullness, a satiety of experience” (Bolter and Grusin 53). This is one aspect of remediation, according to Bolter and Grusin, what they call “hypermediation.” That is, by increasing the data, and interfaces to the database (which also means increased multimedia and interactivity), digital objects create a sense of immersion. This is something that databases are particularly good at doing.

As important as database is for structuring, and accessing, data, most times we do not notice or think about the database when we read/use digital literary objects. It might just be running quietly in the background, doing what it’s supposed to do. But then often times narrative, in print literature, works the same way. It’s just there to get us to where we want to go; it gives us the “pay-off.”

Works cited:

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2002.

notes on wikis

Most of the following notes are taken from (the assigned reading) “Teaching and Learning Online with Wikis” by Naomi Augar, Ruth Raitman, and Wanlei Zhou, at this URL:

http://www.ascilite.org.au/conferences/perth04/procs/augar.html

Wiki is a collaborative web-site tool for use on the web. It was invented by Ward Cunningham for use on the internet in 1994 (back before there was a World Wide Web or web browsers). The word is Hawaiian and it means “quick.”

Wikis are fully editable websites. That is, they have a system of open editing: Users can visit, read, re-organize and update the structure and content (text and pictures) of a wiki as they see fit.

Wikis have two different writing modes:

Document mode: When used in document mode contributors create collaborative documents written in the third person. Authors leave their additions to the wiki document unsigned. As time passes, multiple authors edit and update the content of the document and gradually the content becomes a representation of the shared knowledge or beliefs of the contributors.

Thread mode: Contributors carry out discussions in the wiki environment by posting signed messages. Others respond by leaving the original messages intact and eventually a group of threaded messages evolves.

Wikis can be seen in two different states:

Read state (default): The wiki page looks just like a normal webpage.

Edit state: When the user wants to edit the wiki page, they must access the wiki’s edit state.

To edit a wiki, a user points their web browser to a wiki URL and clicks an edit button or link featured on each wiki page. Whatever changes are made are recorded on the “history” page. The user can also compose and preserve comments about the editing process, on the “talk” page. All these pages are accessible to all wiki users.

Other people may edit the page the user edits. Some of them (editors or administrators) have the power to undo what the user has done, though they almost always provide explanation when they take such action.

Such collaboration is at the heart of the wiki experience. It is also what makes wikis, such as Wikipedia, controversial. Works that can be edited by anyone, at anytime, lack authority. Adding to the problem is the fact that quite a few people have agendas while they edit and may introduce unsubstantiated and false statements. That is why college professors (like this one) discourage students from citing Wikipedia in papers.

That said, wiki administrators tend to be quite zealous in their oversight of their wikis. According to some, this is particularly true of Wikipedia.

Wiki sites are called wiki clones. They can be written in a variety of programming languages. Some require knowledge of syntax; some are WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”—that is, the wiki editing program does the coding and syntax for you).

Consider the following:

• not all wikis support uploading images
• most wikis support tracking of wiki edits or updates (time and author stamps)
• most wikis have user profile pages
• most wikis have either a login or signature function to authenticate entries
• everything you do on the wiki can be tracked back to you

The authors of the article listed above suggest that every wiki has its own set of rules, or what they call “commandments.” Their commandments might apply to our work with wikis:

1. Post frequently, post well, post haste.

2. Be nice [or "Don't be evil"? This is the motto of Google.]

3. Wiki unto others as you would have them wiki unto you (treat your collaborators as you would like them to treat you).

4. Remember that you contribution is critical to the success of the group.

Like most of the digital applications we have used in this class, wikis were initially used for non-fiction purposes (such as Wikipedia, whose function is mostly educational). But now they have been adapted by creative writers and programmers. We might call creative or fictional wikis “fwikis” or “wiction” (or something else).

The genre of wiki fiction has a number of subordinate genres (subgenres), such as:

• collaborative hypertext
• collaborative interactive fiction
• serialized fiction
• world building (constructed world)
• constructed language
• faux encyclopedia

This week we will look at some examples of these subgenres.

notes on blogs and flogs

Blogs

The word “blog” comes from the combination of web log. The blog was the first important Web 2.0 application. Blogs are online diaries or journals. They share some aspects of newspapers and many newspapers now include blogs on their online sites. Blogs are also used by literary writers and can be considered a genre of digital literature.

Blogs are Web 2.0 applications in that they are published on the web, and allow for interaction between author and reader in the form of comments. They also allow for interaction between different blogs by way of pingbacks and trackbacks. Blogs rely on RSS (“Really Simple Syndication”) technology in which information is published in frequently updated feeds. In blogs, information is organized by category and date (rather than page or chapter).

Blogs had their heyday from approximately 2000 to 2008. During this time, thousands of people created blogs each day. The term “blogosphere” was created around this time to describe the quickly expanding part of the web devoted to blogging. Since 2008, however, blogs have been eclipsed by Facebook and Twitter.

Here are a few places online where you can create a blog for free:

• WordPress (http://wordpress.com)
• Blogger (http://blogger.com)
• LiveJournal (http://livejournal.com)
• ManicFish (http://manicfish.com)
• Open Diary (http://opendiary.com)
• Xanga (http://www.xanga.com)

In the context of this class: Blogs are remediations of diaries and newspapers and are typically multimedia in format. They are hypertextual in that they allow the reader to access the material from different points at his or her pace; like digital poetry and interactive fiction, they are highly interactive.

Flogs

Flogs are fake or fiction blogs. The term “flog” was first used in the context of fake blogs created as part of viral advertising campaigns. Often flogs come in the form of celebrity parody (or character) blogs. The term also includes blogs devoted to publishing fiction, in either anthology or serial format. Some writers use blogs to reflect upon the craft and art of writing. Writers also use the blog format to create original literary works and these too are flogs.

The following are examples of flogs.

Corporate Flog: “Walmarting Across America” (2006)

This was a blog in which two regular people, Jim and Laura, chronicled their travels across America in their RV visiting various Wal-Mart stores. They were later “outed” as employees of a marketing firm hired by Wal-Mart.

See: “Wal-Mart’s Jim and Laura: The Real Story“ by Pallavi Gogoi in Bloomberg Businessweek (9 October 2006)
http://www.businessweek.com/bwdaily/dnflash/content/oct2006/db20061009_579137.htm

Celebrity Flog: “Fake Steve Jobs”
http://www.fakesteve.net/

This is the grand-daddy of celebrity flogs, authored by Daniel Lyons (though his identity was not known for some time), and published regularly from 2006 to January 2011. This was just one celebrity flog featuring figures in the tech sector. Soon after “Fake Steve Jobs” began publishing, fake blogs for Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates (both Microsoft), Michael Dell (Dell), and Mark Cuban appeared.

also:

“Donald Trump’s Blog”
http://www.newsgroper.com/donald-trump

This is just one celebrity parody blog at a site called Newsgroper. Like a lot of such blogs, it is now “on hiatus.” Nothing new has been posted since 2009.

Fiction Anthology Blog: “Name Your Tale: 100-Word Stories Based on Your Titles”
http://www.nameyourtale.com

This flog is a collection of short fiction published on a blog. This makes it a publishing platform rather than a work of literature in itself.

Other such flogs at: http://www.blogcatalog.com/category/writing/fiction

Writer’s Journal Blog: “Tribal Writer”
http://www.tribalwriter.com

This is a flog by Justine Musk in which she writes about the creative and professional aspects of writing process. Like other such blogs, it is also something of an industry/self-help blog (for writers).

Other such flogs at: http://www.blogcatalog.com/category/writing/fiction

Fiction Flog: “Our Cloverdale”
http://ourcloverdale.blogspot.com

This is a humorous fiction blog that shows the daily life in a small fictional town.

Other such flogs at: http://www.blogcatalog.com/category/writing/fiction

Fiction Flog: “Horton’s Folly”
http://hortonsfolly.blogspot.com

This is a fictional character blog set in Scotland. It tells the wacky adventures of Mr. Horton Carew. It is a fiction blog in that it uses all aspects of the blog to create its sense of literary illusion (using, for instance, the profile, comments, and links, as well as various navigational options).

Flog Directories:

Web Fiction Guide
http://webfictionguide.com

Blog Catalog (fiction)
http://www.blogcatalog.com/category/writing/fiction/

Notes on Digital Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a big word for “sense of ourselves.” The way we think of ourselves, when we think of ourselves, is generally as a subject. That is, we generally see ourselves as a rational, conscious, emotional, and individual self. We can think, we can feel (our own feelings, and sometimes those of others), we have free will and control our own destiny, and we are unique and distinct from all others. It is this last point that is generally emphasized when (in the West) we discuss subjectivity: we are individuals, we are separate; we are not objects controlled by others, but rather subjects in control of our selves and our world.

An important point to make is that though it seems like people have always thought of themselves this way, and that everyone in the world thinks this way, subjectivity is more or less an invention, a social or cultural construction. In the chapter selection from How We Became Posthuman, Katherine Hayles makes this very point, describing the history of the liberal subject, developed in the works of philosophers like John Locke; this way of viewing ourselves stems from that time, and is the basis of both modern democracy and capitalism (also known as liberal economics).

To give us some context, and to see how subjectivity is a social/cultural construction, you should know that for Locke, African slaves were not and could never be subjects; they were objects that could be bought and sold (in fact, Locke profited from the slave trade). For Locke, middle class white people were subjects, and model humans; slaves and workers (and for a long time women) were objects, barely human, under the control of subjects. At one point in history all of this was thought to be perfectly natural. Now of course we see how limited, unjust, and unnatural it is. That is because times have changed, and with the attitudes of people.

So history can show us that the sense of ourselves, though it might seem natural and eternal, is the product of social and cultural forces. Working in digital literature (both creating and consuming it) also shows us this. Our sense of self changes when we involve ourselves, physically and mentally, with electronic technology. Mostly this occurs because to be on a computer means to be in what Katherine Hayles calls a “distributed cognitive environment”: our very thinking is mediated by machines. This occurs when it is just me and a computer; but it is even more significant when we are on an electronic network: in that case, our very thinking is mediated by several machines. I will be more specific about how digital technology affects our sense of self, our subjectivity.

1. Immersive subjectivity. One way we lose a sense of ourselves as distinct and separate selves is when we immerse ourselves in a virtual world, such as in a MOO. This is usually done by, once again, allowing machines (computers) to mediate our thinking. There are many other ways in which immersion is a dispersal of self. We have a sense of self in the virtual world, to go along with a usually different sense of self outside that world, in this case the self that is sitting in a chair typing into a keyboard. At a very basic level, when we are immersed and not immersed at the same time we are split selves, which many find a disorienting experience. It can also be a positive, playful experience, as immersion encourages us to create imaginative versions of ourselves in virtual worlds, which may correspond closely with our “real” version of ourselves, but usually are something, or someone, quite different. We don’t necessarily need machines to create this sense of immersion, but machines such as computers certainly enhance the effect and expand the division between “virtual” and “real” self, creating a profoundly divided subjectivity, as we commonly understand that term.

2. Networked subjectivity. As already mentioned, virtual immersion encourages us to create new and different versions of ourselves. In our networked, Web 2.0 world this capability is potentially expanded exponentially. That is, with our various profiles on various social networking sites, we have many different versions of ourselves floating about in cyberspace. We may call these different versions avatars, and they represent, collectively, a splintered self or subjectivity. For me, this works even at the level of login names and passwords. I have one login name that is based on a nickname I had when I was involved in Latin American advocacy activism (“Josa”); I have another one (used with this blog) that is based on a nickname that I had in high school but since grad school has taken on a new resonance, since I am now a scholar and critic of British Romanticism (“Lord Byrne,” a pun on my own name and that of a prominent Romantic poet, Lord Byron). For me, these two login names represent two different aspects of my personality, two different senses of my self, a divided subjectivity. It is also a “distributed” subjectivity, not only in that machines mediate each of these “avatars,” but also because I am projecting different aspects of myself over a network, appearing as an almost ghostly apparition in different digital sites.

3. Technological subjectivity. This is when our sense of self is divided between a psychological self and a mechanical self—that is, when we are cyborgs, human-machine hybrids. Talk to anyone who has a prosthesis such as an artificial limb, a pacemaker, or a hearing aid, and I’m quite certain they will speak of an initial sense of alienation between their mechanical and “real” selves, a divided subjectivity. Eventually the mechanical self and the “real” self become integrated, in which case they become unconflicted cyborgs. But there are a lot of conflicted cyborgs out there, who never get used to the idea. This includes most of us who are cyborgs in a more general sense, who use technology to such a degree that we develop a distinct machine-mediated sense of self, to go along with our “normal” sense of self, outside of the digital realm. (I discuss this in more detail in my lecture notes blog entry on the cyborg.) But I will note here that some scholars and critics of digital literature think that cyborg subjectivity is more than a matter of just having a mechanical device in our bodies; for these, immersive subjectivity and networked subjectivity are also technological, or cyborg, subjectivity, in that they involve the mediation of machines. I think that cyborg subjectivity incorporates these other kinds of subjectivities, but takes it to another whole level, which is why I discuss it as a separate category.

At the very least, we can say that digital technology challenges our sense of a separate, fully-in-control individual self. Being part of a digital world means creating different versions of ourselves, for different situations; it also means that machines will, in some way, be part of the way we project and display these different selves, and the way others receive them. When we think about it (and many of us avoid thinking about it, frightened by the implications), our sense of a unified self is threatened, and we are often made anxious by what we might consider a schizoid, split-apart self. Others find this new distributed subjectivity exciting, and look forward to becoming post-human—but this kind of technological cheer-leading might be yet another way of avoiding the implications of what it means when our age-old way of looking at ourselves seems to be crumbling. Whether frightening or exhilarating, this new subjectivity is certainly something that students in a liberal-arts institution should examine.

Notes on the Cyborg

A cyborg is a cybernetic organism—a human-machine hybrid. Though the cyborg still seems to be mostly a creature of science fiction, Katherine Hayles points out that “about 10% of the current U.S. population are estimated to be cyborgs in the technical sense, including people with electronic pacemakers, artificial joints [and limbs], drug implant systems, implanted corneal lenses, and artificial skin” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”).

The cyborg, then, is a person with prosthetic extensions or enhancements, such as those listed above. But there are also what Katherine Hayles calls “metaphoric cyborgs, including the computer keyboarder joined in a cybernetic circuit with the screen, the neurosurgeon guided by fiber optic microscopy during an operation, and the teen gameplayer” (qtd. in Landow “Cyborg”). We might add to this list the theorists (such as Hayles and Donna Haraway) who use the idea of the cyborg to make their theoretical arguments. In our post-modern world, with just about everyone “plugged in” (especially college students), we are almost all of us “metaphoric cyborgs.”

Jay Clayton would say that our cyborg-nature is more than merely metaphoric. He writes: “Most people in the West today are cyborgs. They have internalized technology so completely that their identities have been transformed” because they have been “reshaped by the total integration of technology and the body.” And yet, becoming aware of this situation, most people resist being called cyborgs. This is not just a reaction against technology, but also against the “complicity it establishes between the individual, as a cybernetic system, and the commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems against which the modern liberal subject has often defined itself.”

I think many of us would accept that we are metaphoric cyborgs, but not actually cyborgs. The idea that we are part machine, part robot, is repulsive to many people who believe they are distinct and independent beings—independent of machines, and of “commercial, bureaucratic, and military systems.” But then there are studies that show that the common use of computer technology (and other digital devices) actually “re-hardwires” our brain, reconfiguring our thinking and even our sense of self, making our brain into software for the hardware of the computer. If this is true, it seems that we are more than “metaphoric” cyborgs, whether we like it or not (and many of us don’t).

The implications for the student of digital literature seem quite clear: if we use a machine to access, read, process, and store data in the form of digital literature, we are affecting our brain configuration, and becoming more like a literal cyborg. This is something that Katherine Hayles (once again) addresses in her article on Patchwork Girl and hypertext: “Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity.”

But again, many students, trained to view literature as something uplifting, as bearing time-honored cultural value, as affirming the best and most noble qualities of the human being, resist “cyborg subjectivity.” In fact, many would see literature (and by extension art) as the last bastion of human subjectivity in a increasingly mechanistic and machine-mad world. To say that this is basically a Romantic stance would mean little to most students today, but the relationship of literature to technology, and our relationship to technologized literature, is a vital question for our consideration in this class. I do not pretend to have the answer to that question here; it is beyond the scope of a blog entry—probably beyond the scope of a semester of digital literature.

Leaving aside the question of whether we are “metaphoric” or actual cyborgs, I would argue that our attitudes towards the cyborg have changed over the years, and will no doubt continue to change. In fact, I can imagine writing a paper on the topic, which would look like:

Title: “Canning the Uncanny: The Naturalization of the Cyborg in Ironman.”

Explanation of the title, in introductory paragraph: The uncanny is a psychological term that Ernst Jentsch used to explain the anxiety we feel caused by “doubts whether an apparently animate being is really alive; or conversely, whether a lifeless object might not be in fact animate,” and refers “to the impression made by waxwork figures, ingeniously constructed dolls and automata” (quoted in Freud). In the current context, this would include robots and especially cyborgs, which are part human and part machine. “Naturalization” refers to the opposite condition: we accept something as normal and, the anxiety gone, no longer even think about it. My thesis, then, is that after a period of anxious speculation we have by now mostly accepted the idea of the cyborg as a cultural symbol, and are well on the way to accepting that we ourselves are “metaphoric” cyborgs.

In the paper proper, I would consider three phases in the history of the cyborg.

I. Utopian Cyborg. Utopian means “no place”; it is a hypothetical, imaginative place of ultimate possibility.  The utopian cyborg is a creature of this hopeful possibility, as imagined by cybernetic theorists like Norbert Weiner, the inventor of cybernetics. As Katherine Hayles makes clear in her book How We Became Posthuman, the early cybernetic thinkers considered mechanically-enhanced humans to be a good thing, a condition that did not threaten the liberal subject—the autonomous, rational self. At this early stage, before the advent of the personal computer, works in popular culture—particularly films, television programs, and science fiction novels—tended to celebrate the possibilities of cybernetic enhancement of the human. Here I would sample some of these works, such as television’s Six Million Dollar Man and Hans Moravec’s novel Mind Children.

II. Dystopian Cyborg. A dystopia is a utopia gone bad, a proposed paradise which has been marred by technology run amok, no longer under the control of humans. The dystopian cyborg, then, is an out-of-control monster, generally wreaking havoc and making human life miserable. This is the cyborg most of us are familiar with in the age of the personal computer and computer networks; popular culture is replete with these monstrous, uncanny cyborgs, such as the cyborgs in the Terminator films, the Matrix films, and Blade Runner; the Six Million Dollar Man and the Borg collective (Star Trek franchise) in television; and the rogue operators in cyberpunk fiction (particularly in the novels of William Gibson) in literature.

III. Ubiquitopian Cyborg. If utopian means “no place,” ubiquitopian means “every place.” Not only is the cyborg more accepted and common in a Web 2.0 environment (thus “everywhere”), but the distributed nature of the self over a network, with many machine-mediated versions planted throughout cyberspace, also speaks to the dispersed, everywhere-ness of the cyborg. My case in point would be the film Ironman, which features a man who is quite literally a cyborg, with a pace-maker in his chest, and when in his robot suit, a fully-integrated man-machine hybrid. He is also someone plugged into a network by which he can be monitored by others, and is thus “cognitively distributed” (I would also find some current literature that would provide some equivalent cases). The important point here is that by now, with the ubiquity of personal computing and social networking sites, we are becoming less bothered by the implications of the cyborg, and the idea that we are, at least in part, cyborgs ourselves. In this sense, the concept of the cyborg has become naturalized, safely canned for consumption.

The above “paper” might be a bunch of malarkey, and it might never be written, but I put it out there (in cyberspace, like a good cyborg should) to give an example of how one might think through the idea of the cyborg, in the context of popular art and literature. You might come up with a very different schema, which is fine, but the cyborg is not something we can now dismiss as a pipe-dream. If only as a concept reflected in imaginative works, the cyborg must be reckoned with. At the very least it will prepare you to think seriously before getting that wireless-access node implanted in your brain, something that might be a very real possibility within a decade.

Works Cited:

Clayton, Jay. “Frankenstein’s Monster, Replicants, and Cyborgs.” Charles Dickens in Cyberspace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.

Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” Laurel Amtower homepage.
<http://www-rohan.sdsu.edu/~amtower/uncanny.html>. 10 November 2008.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Landow, George P. The Cyborg. Cyberart Database.
<http://www.cyberartsweb.org/cpace/cyborg/cyborgov.html>. 10 November 2008.

Notes on He, She, and It

He, She, and It is a science fiction novel by Marge Piercy published in 1991. It is considered by critics to be a good example of a specific type of science fiction: cyberpunk. Cyberpunk literature and film is typically set in a dystopian future in which technology runs amok and the world is dominated by corporate interests. What makes Piercy’s novel a particularly interesting example of cyberpunk is that is also suggests the possibility of a utopian future. The world has been destroyed but there are efforts to learn from past mistakes and heal the planet.

The novel might also be classified as a “hard science fiction” novel. Hard science fiction distinguishes itself from regular science fiction in that the author strives to depict a world, and a kind of science, that is plausible and based on established findings in physics, biology, cybernetics, etc. The fact that the novel is a work of hard science fiction is somewhat dispiriting because what it predicts, in terms of destruction of the planet, seems all too plausible. He, She, and It is set in the middle of the 21st century, in which the planet has been nearly destroyed by nuclear war, and poisoned by chemical and biological warfare. Following what Piercy calls the Two Week War—which is started when a terrorist nukes Jerusalem, drawing the Middle-East into a devastating war—radiation pervades the atmosphere, and oil can no longer be drilled, which has ruined the global economy.

Piercy describes other, related, problems. Global temperatures have risen, causing flooding of coastal areas, and turning “bread-basket” food-producing areas into desert. She calls this “the greenhouse effect,” which is an old name for global warming. This has led to devastating famines in which most of the world’s population perishes, and outbreaks of new diseases such as the Kisrami Plague. Also, the ozone layer has been shredded, making life outside of shelter or wraps (permeable covers of entire cities) extremely dangerous because of deadly ultraviolet rays. There is also acid rain. Much of this is a very plausible part of the future of the planet. Some of it, according to scientists, is already happening. I’m talking about global warming, the destruction of the ozone layer, and peak oil.

Like any good science fiction writer, Piercy gives us a fully-realized world. The all-too-plausible dystopian elements are part of this. Also part of it are the places, both physical and virtual, that Piercy describes. The novel gives us a United States which is mostly desert, with the rest of the habitable space filled by sprawling metropolises which are lawless zones filled with violence and disease (the Glop). There are also corporate enclaves where the privileged live (multis). There are off-planet satellites (where Shira’s ex-husband takes their child). There are free towns like Tikva where inhabitants are allowed freedom because they produce things that the multis need. In the case of Tikva, they produce computer hardware and software. Avram works in artificial intelligence (and cyborgs). Malkah works in chimeras (deceptive computer programs). These, we learn, are very desirable to the powerful corporations. In this world, as Nili remarks in the novel, “the ability to access information is power” (194). The ability to manipulate information, and to use information to deceive, is also power. This, also, is a fairly accurate description of the world today in regards to the power of information to control people, and its centrality in the global economy.

There are also virtual spaces described in the novel. Piercy writes about a world-wide Net, very similar to the internet, which is free and open to anyone. In her world there are also corporate and town Bases, very similar to the kind of massive databases that Google administers, which are closely guarded. Most people access the Net and Bases by way of “projection” in which electric wires connect computers to a port in the head of the person who wishes to jack into the system.

This is one thing that might have seemed likely in 1991, when Piercy wrote her novel, but now of course we live in a world where people communicate, and travel, virtually without wires using mobile devices. It seems likely that Piercy, were she writing her novel today, would envision wireless access to the Net and the Bases, by way of circuitry surgically implanted in people’s heads. Because that’s probably where we’re headed. (I’ll note that another science fiction author, Samuel Delany, in Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand—published in 1984—describes the kind of wireless access I mention above).

But in Piercy’s world, people do more than just cower under cover trying to survive and interface with technology. Piercy’s description of the various forms of entertainment on her ruined planet is also fully realized, and not too far removed from our entertainments today. Many people watch “stimmies,” which are three-dimensional and thus immersive stories. Stimmies are similar to virtual reality spaces already in existence which are accessed by way of virtual reality suits and helmets. An even more immersive form of stimmies are “spikes,” in which the “player” can actually interject him or herself into the action. These games are highly addictive and can lead to a situation in which the player gets lost in the game while his or her body starves to death. There are also 3-D holographic spaces to play in. These come in the form of “holos” or “virons” (you’ll recall that Gadi, in the novel, designs virons). These virons are also incorporated into stimmies and spikes. In Piercy’s world, nearly everyone can afford stimmies, but if they can’t there are also highly addictive hallucinogenic drugs which are affordable and available. There are also “flat films” which are like the films we see today. But there doesn’t not seem to be anything resembling television. Nor are there print newspapers, magazines, or books. All of these can be accessed in digital form on the Net.

The hard-science aspect of the novel also applies to the social sciences. Piercy seems a fairly accomplished amateur anthropologist in her novel. She describes with great detail (or “granularity”) the social and cultural institutions of different parts of her world, including the multis, the Glop, and egalitarian free towns like Tikva. Her explanation of the dystopian economics of the future Earth are particularly convincing. It would be interesting to read an economist’s take on Piercy’s dystopian economics. However, I would hope people at major corporations would steer clear of this novel, because I think they would learn too much how to control places and people in the event of a world disaster such as that described by Piercy.

I should add, on the subject of fictional anthropology, the role of Judaism in the book is quite unique. It’s not something that you would find in other science fiction novels. This futuristic Judaism, and Piercy’s description of the subculture of post-dystopia Jewish communities like Tikva and the one from which Nili comes from in Israel, is very well developed and quite plausible. This is true as well for the history of Judaism in the book. Roughly a third of the novel is set in Prague in the year 1600, featuring the Rabbi Judah Loew and the Golem, a legendary figure in Jewish history. The story of the Golem is legendary, but Piercy’s take on Jewish life in early modern Europe is quite accurate. It was certainly not an easy time or place to be Jewish.

Piercy is also a pretty decent political scientist, based one what we read in her novel. The corporate-based geopolitical power games she writes about are, for the most part, extensions of current political reality. They reveal Piercy’s political investments as well, since she clearly favors the more egalitarian democratic structures such as those in Tikva. Piercy was a progressive political activist before she was a novelist, and most of her novels show that influence. In this regard, the most prominent would be Vida, which is about a Weather Underground type activist living underground, and City of Light, City of Darkness which relates the events of the French Revolution through the perspective of the women who were involved. Woman on the Edge of Time also reflects Piercy’s leftist politics in her depiction of a future world that is quite similar to He, She, and It.

However, it is not as an anthropologist or a political activist that we read He, She, and It in a digital literature class. Rather, it is because she touches upon many of the themes, and the media, we discuss in our class. First of all, it’s important that He, She, and It is a book. I began the semester talking about the book as a form of technology. I hope you have read it with that in mind. When you do so, you see that there are some things about Piercy’s story that would not completely translate to a digital format. You also see that Piercy really knows how to use the technology of the book format to tell her story. And like any good novel in the format of a book, she knows how to use character and plot to immerse the reader in the story.

She also makes reading, particularly novels, a theme within her story. Remember that a big reason that Yod does not run amok like previous versions of the cyborg was that he was socialized by Malkah and Shira. An important component of this is his reading. First of all, he reads Malkah’s story, which is written for him. He reads a lot of other poetry and fiction. He explicitly reads novels in order to learn about the psychology of humans. Critics and historians of the novel would no doubt applaud this touch, since the novel—in English anyway—was a product of a new kind of human subjectivity, and tended to be highly psychological. One of the novels he reads to understand humans, and his human side, is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (another reason why we read He, She, and It in this class). Yod reads Frankenstein after Gadi refers to it, and thinks himself monstrous. Shira disabuses him of this notion. She says: “You were not created out of some mad ambition of Avram’s to become a god. You’re not cobbled out of human garbage. You were created to protect a vulnerable and endangered community” (150). Besides this disavowal, it is clear that Piercy wants the reader to make connections between her cyborg and Shelley’s Creature. She also makes the strained relationship between Yod and his creator Avram at the center of her story. As you recall, this was also at the center of Shelley’s story, though it has been de-emphasized or removed from television and film versions.

Piercy’s novel is, as mentioned, is an immersive read, but it also describes with great accuracy the experience of technologically-enhanced immersion—which she calls “projection”—and the problems related to it. You may not remember, but Shira’s main area of expertise is on the psychology of projection, in particular the way that experience can be damaging to people. Much of the action in the novel occurs in the virtual world of projection. This includes a lot of action, some of it violent, and all of it believable to anyone who has played console video games.

What Piercy does really well is investigate the psychological, philosophical, and existential condition of the immersive virtual experience. Part of this is the way people play with identity while projected. For instance, Malkah plays around with gender while projected, taking on the virtual vesture of a man, and encourages Shira to play around with her online identity in similar ways. In the novel, shape-shifting is common online; Yod is particularly ingenious as a shape-shifter (and “chimeras,” which Malkah works on, are also forms of shape-shifting). Though in this class we aren’t really “projected,” we still deal with the existential issues of identity online—in the ways people might abuse the amorphous nature of identity (Mr. Bungle in the LambdaMOO), and the ways they might use it to create characters (such as in many of the fiction blogs and wikis, as well as faux Facebook and Twitter).

Finally, we read He, She, and It to get a better understanding of cyborgs. Piercy’s Yod is one of the better evocations of the cyborg in fiction. As a character, he’s very well-developed, believable, and sympathetic. But more importantly he dramatizes the hopes and fears of the cyborg, and particularly the uneasy balance between machine and embodied person. In the end, he realizes that as an experiment in creating a sentient weapon he is a failure because such an entity is an impossible contradiction. A weapon that can feel the pain he or she inflicts will never be an effective weapon, which is why Yod takes the drastic action of destroying himself, his creator, and all the documentation of how he came to be. No creatures should be subjected to such an existential dilemma.

Yod is not the only cyborg in the novel. Nili is also a cyborg, though more human than machine (Yod is arguably more machine than human). But just about everyone else in the novel is also a cyborg. In a technologically sophisticated world, such as that described in the novel, we are all cyborgs. Shira expresses this on a number of occasions in the novel, most eloquently in this passage when she responds to Yod after he suggests he is “unnatural”:

Yod, we’re all unnatural now. I have retinal implants. I have a plug set into my skull to interface with a computer. I read time by a corneal implant. Malkah has a subcutaneous unit that monitors and corrects blood pressure and half her teeth are regrown. Her eyes have been rebuilt twice. Avram has an artificial heart and Gadi a kidney…. I couldn’t begin to survive without my personal base: I wouldn’t know who I was. We can’t go unaided into what we haven’t yet destroyed of “nature.” Without a wrap, without sec skins and filters, we’d perish. We’re all cyborgs, Yod. You’re just a purer form of what we’re all tending toward. (150)

Think about your own dependence on technology, such as whatever machine you’re using to read this. In this sense, Piercy’s future is now.

Notes on Nick Montfort’s “Interactive Fiction in Our Culture”

Montfort begins his chapter on interactive fiction (IF) by citing its influence. Not only has IF influenced graphical computer and console games, but it was also a factor in the development of MUDS (multiple user domains or “dungeons”) and MOOS (MUD Object Oriented), both of which are virtual spaces in electronic environments in which multiple “players” can interact and develop their virtual spaces. We’ll be doing some work in a MOO this coming week, and the assigned readings will tell you more. IF has also been influential on computer-based Role Playing Games (RPGs) and internet-based Massive Role Playing Games (MRPGs).

Montfort also cites the role IF plays in actually teaching people how to use a computer, or a language, or many other possible pedogogical applications. IF, according to Montfort, “teaches two essential principles of computing: Try absolutely everything you can think of and save all the time.” Excellent advice, and not just for computer-learning! Outside of the small community of IF developers and players, I would think that the use of IF in educational environments (such as in our class) is the major use of IF.

Montfort also cites the influence of IF on more traditional fiction forms, such as short stories and novels. He cites one example, Jayne Loader’s story “Wild America,” which some critics see as a critique of the lack of interactivity in interactive fiction. Montfort quickly dismisses this critique but I think, based on our experience with IF, that it has some basis and may in fact be part of the relative unpopularity of this form. Graphical computer and console games seem to offer the “player” a lot more freedom than IF does.

Montfort spends some time dealing with the future of IF—or rather, with the bad predictions others have made.  Gary McGath, Montfort notes, predicted that IF would become more realistic and would allow for simultaneous “game play,” neither of which has panned out in IF. However, it has panned out in graphical computer/console games, which Montfort doesn’t mention. Could it be that the lack of IF development is due to the development of graphical games? Why work so hard to create this kind of functionality in a text-based system when you can get it in your graphical computer games?

On this issue, and many others we’ve looked at in this class, the competition between the verbal (textual) and the visual (graphical) has been fierce, with the text-based form generally forced to limit itself to those things that text does best, such as develop intricate plots and explore character motivation. This means that we will probably see IF becoming more, rather than less, literary, since it can’t compete with the visual stimulation gained from games that highlight the visual. For Montfort, this is part of the “broader question of whether, in the future, the computer will be seen by the general reading population as a form of potential literature or as one that is capable of providing the sorts of experiences that literary readers value.”

In asking why IF continues to be developed, Montfort answers: “to amuse the initiated.” In doing so, he acknowledges that this amusement might be irrational, even pathological, though he also has hopes that IF might also “be created because of metaphysical or political concerns, to explore the relationship between people and computers or between people and texts, to describe utopian as well as dystopian worlds, and to express or challenge cultural notions.” But the insularity of many IF gamers poses as challenge to this hope. So too the fact that IF is not, and probably never will be, marketable. This isn’t necessarily a problem, according to Montfort. Poetry is another art form that doesn’t pay, but still is viable in our culture. IF might achieve the same status. (Of course, poetry is not as labor-intensive as IF is, which requires not only quite a bit of computer savvy to play, but also programming chops for IF developers).

A larger problem, according to Montfort, may be that there is still (and may always be) a “cultural bias against the computer as a literary medium.” He explains further: “Common preconceptions about what a computer game is and the common way in which such games are dismissed make it harder to accept the idea of computer literature.” I question this assertion. I think people have problems not with computer-based literature, but with computer-based literature that calls itself a game. That is, if we approach IF as a game, we expect to be entertained, to have fun, and when this doesn’t happen, as with other games, we declare that IF is a failure. But if we approach IF as an educational or academic practice; as a form, like poetry, that is not economically viable but still valuable as art; or even as a puzzle (as cognitive exercise), we realize that IF still has a lot to offer.

In his conclusion, Montfort seems to be leaning in this direction. He writes: “Interactive fiction has already offered vital and relevant worlds to fathom, riddles that challenge our assumptions, and machines that accept and produce texts so as to engage us with both their outputs and their workings….not only for fun but as a form that can offer transforming and profound experiences.” To which I only add, forget about the fun. IF can be valuable even if it doesn’t entertain us, and insisting it’s fun only makes it less so.