Winter wonderland
I just can’t seem to get into hypertext. I’m still deep into paperbacks.
One point I took from The End of Books was this:
The Reader Comes of Age
The reader does not merely passively accept or receive a given literary work but through the act of reading participates along with the author in the creation of the actional world evoked by the heretofore lifeless text. . . .
At first glance, interactive action acts out this process literally. It seems to emancipate the reader from domination by the text putting her in at least partial control of the sequence of events. . . .
. . . interactive action looks as though it acts out one particular model of reader response. Iser has suggested that the text of a novel lays down certain limits, but within those limits are gaps which a reader feels impelled to all. An inter- active fiction seems to make this arrangement explicit.
—Anthony Niesz and Norman Holland, “Interactive Fiction” (1984)
I can understand and accept all that, but what deters me most from interactive fiction is the reading off a screen; I kinda like turning pages, folding pages for book marks and closing a book, putting it away for a day and then finding it again. It seems that with interactive fiction, this traditional ritual has been forgotten. The classics are paperbacks and they’ll remain best as paperbacks. When I read a book, I’m never distracted by YouTube and anything online because I am immersed in it. But with this narratology thing, I can see myself reading a few pages and then jumping on to a new webpage. It’d make the process so much slower and it’d kill the experience. I just wouldn’t be able to appreciate the work as much because I’d be partially involved in the experience…
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[…] Daniel has similar concerns about books and the classics are paperbacks. History lessons: the Illiad is a classic, begun in about 800BC, first paperback edition, well paperbacks started in the late nineteenth century, so that’d be over two thousand years later. We could run through classical Greek literature with the same outcome. Or even Don Quixote, one of the first ‘novels’, which also couldn’t appear in paperback for about two hundred years. The point is not that they weren’t paperbacks but that the novel is a recent form and a lot of work that is now in paperback form was never created for the book, a book, any book. So books do not equal literature. They equal a current technology for the literary (one amongst several). So as media scholars we need to think carefully about the relation of media, technology, and form, as this is not a simple relation. In relation to Daniel’s concern about bookmarks and so on. For multilinear fiction the solution is usually to remember where you are up to and offer to begin from where you go to. For ereaders the options are much more sophisticated. It will remember where you are up to, can store multiple bookmarks, lets you highlight passages, share your highlights if you wish with other readers, tell you how long you’ve been reading for, build a concordance of places and characters, visualise how long the work is, how long the current chapter is, where you are in the chapter, where you are in relation to the book, where the chapter is in relation to the book. And so on. I’m playfully intrigued by the roll call of why the physicality of the media matters here with out recognising that we’re humanities students, so we think this matters to us, but as I wrote yesterday, the same conversation happens with photographers and the digital, cinematographers and the digital, journalists and the blog, and so on. We need to recognise what we bring to this conversation as what we bring to it, and not the universalist claims we try to make them to defend them. […]