This link has been bookmarked by 3 people . It was first bookmarked on 31 Jan 2008, by lisaderry.
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29 Mar 09
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This is writing (or more accurately, textual production in various media) that depends on a feedback mechanism operated and partly controlled by the receiver to evoke a particular state of a variable or combinatorial text.
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Since these schemes aim to make the Web safe for advertising, it is reasonable to assume that users will not be encouraged to make other connections, but rather to keep the channel open and await instructions. Don't touch that keyboard:
<!--_extract--> [The] almost neurotic urge to zap has falsely led people to think that what viewers want is more zapping, more control, more steering. What they want instead are more ways to zap. More ways of interrupting flow, more varieties of story and no-story, text and game, of things done together with other people and things done alone. More states that flit between steering the media and being steered by it. More ability to tweak the dial, between twirling and being twirled, so that finally you can dance with the media. (Kelly and Wolf 19)
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His Johnsonian logic runs thus: "3-D" did not last. Hyperfiction will not last. Nothing new lasts. Works like Michael Joyce's afternoon are by implication the literary equivalent of Creature from the Black Lagoon or It Came from Outer Space--curios, sports, and instances of bad taste, interesting only as they mark the limits of invention.
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Since cyberspace relies on "Industrial" ways and means, it can never really be independent. We might remind ourselves where electricity comes from.
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He asserts, for instance, that because they lack a single, determined ending, hypertexts say nothing of value about the consequences of human action. Yet many such texts are deeply concerned with causal logic and if read with reasonable engagement can convey very clear messages about choices and outcomes
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In many hypertexts it is hard indeed to develop a sense of direction
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. Interactive construction, says Douglas, does not efface or impair the author position but rather transforms it. Authors of interactive pieces in any genre come to be what playwrights have always been: creators of initial conditions for later performance ("Where the Senses" 35).
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on the other hand, is an experience that combines the matter transporter of science fiction with the slot machines of Las Vegas: instantaneous transition with the possibility of surprise.
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That's no bug, it's a feature.
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f links and other interactive transactions are inherently confusing, traversing an invisible, nonspecific space, then these elements must also convey something of a phenomenological crisis or surprise even when they work as intended.
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These other possibilities are not present or realized (indeed they may be imaginary) but we cannot exclude them from the transaction.
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31 Jan 08
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"cybertext" (Aarseth 19). This is writing (or more accurately, textual production in various media) that depends on a feedback mechanism operated and partly controlled by the receiver to evoke a particular state of a variable or combinatorial text.
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much cybertextual interest these days concerns text production on the Internet and its World Wide Web, a subtype of electronic writing called hypertext or hypermedia.
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Bolter has perhaps best expressed the expected impact of cybertext on intellectual life. He predicts both an atomization and a new regime:
<!--_extract--> Although we . . . lose the satisfaction of belonging to a coherent cultural tradition, we gain the freedom to establish our own traditions in miniature. The computer offers people [End Page 652] the opportunity to build liaisons with other readers and writers. . . . Unlike television, which promotes uniformity (even through the apparent diversity of cable and satellite stations), the microcomputer and the phone network really do permit special literacies to survive. (238)
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As Douglas points out, there is nothing especially radical about situating writing in a virtual space: "It can be argued that since the advent of the modern novel readers have been challenged with the task of reading something that approximates the virtual, three-dimensional space of hypertext narratives" ("How Do I Stop" 176). Indeed, an approach to text as a contingent arrangement of discursive possibilities might be traced throughout narratology from the Russian Formalist pairing of sjuzet and fabula up through structuralism, affective stylistics, and Reconstruction.
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As Pfeil said two decades ago, "writing should demand we see." Part of what we see must be the medium itself, and in the case of electronic text, its dubious, contingent [End Page 670] claims to represent a semantic space, broken (happily) out of the seamlessness of cyberspace. Beyond this, Pfeil would no doubt insist that we see something larger, namely the articulation between discursive practices like cybertext and late-capitalist enterprises like software development, publishing, and broadcasting--that we recognize our alleged obsolescence and evident marginality, or as Thomas Pynchon calls it, our preterition.
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