Lori Emerson's List: digital textuality criticism

• True, the hybridity of the forms and technological innovation that artists bring to  their work results in a high level of experimentation that may at first obfuscate literary content and resist all attempts  at categorizing and classifying it.
• Epistemology in Western culture has been predicated on our ability to name things in order to know them. If Mark Amerika is  right and we are, indeed, "witnessing the emergence of a 'digitally-processed intermedia art' in which literature and all  the other arts are being 'remixed into yet other forms still not fully developed'" (Gallix),
• We are essentially fooled into thinking that what we are reading isn't literary because the  differences in the sensory modalities used to interact with these works are so different from print-based literature.
• Growing  in importance are programs in Digital Humanities; however, these programs are generally separate from English Departments,  and their focus is placed not so much on the production of native born digital writing (i.e. elit) as it is on preserving  and presenting analog-based literary works for digital contexts (i.e. Emily Dickinson's poetry on the web).
• Ironically, the field of digital media, where many of us gravitate to if we leave English, has likewise ignored elit. For  the most part, digital media theory has been dominated by scholars and critics trained in formalistic theories of cinema and  visual art. Lev Manovitch uses Russian formalism, for example, as his lens for formulating views of "new" media, while Oliver  Grau focuses his attention on Italian Futurism. What chance does an emergent form with literature in its name have when faced  with such a strong art history perspective? Likewise, Stephen Wilson devotes little attention in his 900+ page book Information Arts to early hypertext work with no mention of more contemporary elit pieces. That "net art" became the name of choice for some  working in the area of web-based elit should come as no surprise under these circumstances since the term "literature" in  the name of elit may have limited its inclusion in media art festivals, exhibitions, and art scholarship. So, the irony is  that the electronic aspect of elit creates suspicion for traditional English departments just as the notion of literature  does not fit well for the visual or media arts.
• So,  in reality, unless it is an English Department where a Kate Hayles or Joe Tabbi works, a Digital Humanities Program where  a Matthew Kirshenbaum teaches, or a Writing program where a Nick Montfort is on faculty, Michael Joyce's work will not receive  the same level of attention that James Joyce's does.
• The solution, then, to making the public more aware of elit lies in rethinking our notion of literacy. It involves technological  literacy that is not simply seen as "a complex set of socially and culturally situated values, practices, and skills involved  in operating linguistically within the context of electronic environments, including reading, writing, and communicating"  (Selfe 11), but one that extends to visual, sonic, kinetic, and kinesthetic modalities, allowing us to "situate knowledges"  to offer "a more adequate, richer, better account of the world" (Selfe 146-8).
• little work on the subject of  literacy theorizes about how electronic literary art impacts definitions of literacy or perspectives regarding literacy practices.
• The truth of the matter is that if indeed students spend 10 times more of  their energy with fingers on a keyboard instead of a nose in a book, then it stands to reason that we should rethink our notion  of literacy and advocate elit as not only viable but also compelling art form for teaching all aspects of reading, writing,  and communicating.

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• Furthermore, some new media practitioners themselves have come to the conclusion that far from setting the audience free, involving them in a game rather than simply giving them text to read is trading one form of control for another.
• The work - pointedly subtitled "No Exit" - deliberately uses interactivity as a means of entrapping readers or viewers rather than liberating them.
  
• The Princess Murderer exemplifies the problem. It isn't by any means a fully-fledged computer game, but a hyperfiction which incorporates a number of game-style design elements. It's cleverly-conceived and well-written, but its Achilles' heel is the fact that the more you engage with its game-playing aspects - basically, clicking rapidly from one "page" to another in order to change the scores displayed at the bottom of the screen - the more difficult it becomes to pay attention to its literary content.
• but the first problem is that its meaning is too thoroughly explained in the introductory screens
• The game itself merely illustrates these statements without developing them.
• Simplification of format seems to be a common feature amongst the more successful computerised art-games.
• In some respects the game's most important qualities are negative ones: it makes its statement as much in terms of what it isn't, and what it doesn't do, as in terms of what it is and does.

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