[to begin]

June 11, 2013

Using technology to teach people how to read.

Using technology to express anxiety about changes.

Using technology to self-consciously explore attributes of the new technology.

[There are four definitions of medium. I am interested only in one of them: medium as material, which raises the question of whether a network is a material.]

The similarities that I am seeing between these examples from the 18th c. and some early interactive fiction works relate to experiments in medium, but not mode. This may happen later, though I sense that remediation may make it more likely that we instead redefine the text itself, what we call literature.

These electronic literary works, like those from the past are very much part of a literary tradition that began with solitary readers.

What happens if we stress some of the similarities rather than differences between works from the past and the present? What happens if these texts represent a supplement to older works rather than a new way of reading?

The phenomenology of reading may not change until a truly different configuration between reader and writer emerges (wreader; the term is not my invention, it is taken from Charles Bernstein): Immersion versus co-construction.

nonlinearity; alternate endings; medium specific semiosis: all are related to an ongoing project related to the mimetic efficacy of any mode or medium. What changes may be the relationships between fact and fiction. We are awfully focused on the tools right now, when, in fact, these tools [today] are potentially less of a concern than they were [then].

coexistential versus referential modes

doing/performing/signifying versus illlustrating

verbal handwritten

type

oral

genre=mode/medium find balance

communication systems

distribution systems

one to one communication with manuscript culture

Who is reading? (forming and enacting community)

How are they reading? (close-reading as a type of replication of conversation) substitution versus addition; technologies of the word (how the word functions: word and thing).