As I scurried into the lecture (late again, cursed 56!) I caught the end of Adrian’s reference to materiality and immediately flashed back to my overwhelmed self a week prior… Philosophy again? Really?

Regardless of my initial dismay, much of what he had to say was in fact extremely thought-provoking. His overarching idea: materiality matters. My lightbulb moment occurred as he asked us to take away all discursive meaning of a book and attempt to explain it to someone that has never seen nor heard of one before. It was near impossible and I kept being roadblocked by yet another question ‘but what are pages?’, ‘what are letters?’. It made me realise that everything I understand about a book is in its materiality and the preconditions I’ve developed about it.
He then moved on to question our expectation that a narrative would have a beginning, middle and end. And well, since Aristotle times, this is precisely true. A story without such a narrative structure leaves my mind reeling and makes me feel more than a little uncomfortable. Yet have I unconsciously been experiencing this bizarre approach to narrative online everyday? In a network that is entirely limitless and you have complete control over where you begin and finish to read, does a beginning middle and end exist? I think that yes, each singular entry online has some kind of structure and this is integral to our understanding of it. I can’t tell if this is my OCD personality talking however, so it will be interesting to see how my perceptions change (if at all) over the semester.