Massive Digital Creep

Electronic literature is great and full of insanely interesting interactions that mutually redefine humans and the computers that love them. For all of Katherine Hayles diligent and incredibly helpful surveying of the field in her Electronic Literature, it seems like she attends only to the very avant-guard. This choice makes sense, especially as regards her primary thesis that humans and "their" technology are co-constitutive, co-evolutionary and currently co-habituating at their fullest in these premiere examples of e-lit. While these works may best give evidence to the heights of this interrelation, there is a vast market-world of what is arguably e-lit circulating out there that she largely ignores.

It is the print books that she gives attention to that prompts me most here. Hayles's three examples of print literature embracing the mark of the digital are fairly heavily circulated works (with the possible exception of People of Paper, tho its publication by McSweeney's guarantees its status as hip). Hayles herself goes as far as calling elements of Foer's novel "gimmicky," tho she argues justifiably so (166). In these works we have a coupling of both mass audience and a sense of tiredness captured in the feeling of gimmickiness. This is a total departure from the earlier chapters' work on electronic literature's exploration of all new human-computer interactions. While Hayles largely praises these works, she uses them primarily as demonstrative of the creep of digitalization and thus places these works as secondary to electronic literature (with the possible exception of House of Leaves which seems to retain a form of innovation well suited to its casing as book). Thinking of their broad(er) appeal then might provide insights into which elements of digitalization have taken the forefront in capturing our attentions.

Returning then to the presumptive market-world of mass electronic literature, it seems that a fruitful study could be done of the many forms of popular electronic literature that exists, from video game to web comics to flash animation. Certainly, these objects too must be doing the work of reeducating our modes of thinking. And they are happening everywhere...all the time. This is all to say that taking a peek into the explosion of creativity that is the internet one might find the modes of co-constitution and reeducation that are the most transformative and have gained the most credence among viewers.

(Check out the Qwantz link especially and read through it / try to. While this was a guest comic, the type of experimentation is not atypical.)

Hayles, N. Katherine.Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary. Notre Dame, IN: U

Notre Dame Press, 2008.