Georgia has an elegant post about things that don’t end. Or where endings become something else, less formal, known, predicted, and well, just plain organised. Like life. (Yep, one of the defences of something like hypertext and other messy forms is that it is more ‘realistic’ than realism in fiction because, well, the real world is not just so cause and effect as a novel pretends it to be.) Tony is not convinced about hypertext and fiction but does make the very accurate observation that wikipedia is a never ending hypertextual non fiction work. Absobloodylutely. It has no beginning (unlike a traditional encyclopaedia), no end, no last page, and as hypertext theorists tells, it really isn’t that hard to use or get our heads around. So, imagine a wiki novel…. (now there’s a project worth thinking about in the future with some students). Sian likes the idea but feels it might be like too much work (reading a multilinear work). As said in the unsymposium, think of them as musical, so you return to them, and let them find you over time (like that song you listened to once, didn’t like much, by the 5th listening you realise it’s actually pretty good, notice already the difference to the novel or the Goosebump series – the 5th time, because if these works are musical we need to read them more than once to let them show us their rhythms). They are also very well suited to some sorts of stories, not others, much like the novel (which sucks if you want to write something that wants to perform change rather than just describe it).
Damn You People Write a Lot
Turn my back and overnight 130 new blog posts have appeared. This is my first go at catch up. And just a heads up, if you are now blogging about readings and classes from any of weeks one, two, three, four, they won’t appear here.
Kevin writes about technoanxiety, and disagrees with Douglas’ claim about book sales. Though to be fair to Douglas things have changed a lot since she wrote the book, particularly with the rise of the franchised novel/film model which, will cinematically artless, is economically very powerful. The refusal to link out, bad idea, it is treated your blog as the internet version of a gated community, kiss of death for the network which is defined by and as its ability to connect (link). One reason some news sites collapse is because of their anxiety about ‘losing’ traffic. Except it is an economy that is about connecting, not funnelling. Boglarka wants to mourn books and notes that “I for one hat readings that are excerpts from a textbook online”. Absolutely, but Douglas et al are arguing for what these days media people like to call born digital works. Things that are made digital not scans, with all the bells and whistles that provides (lines that can stretch automatically to let you write notes between the lines, highlighters in different colours and the ability to automatically export all that you have highlighted, and so on).
Denham has notes on symposium 0.3 and also on books and the pleasure of the physicality. If only to know where you’re up to. However, an ereader like Marvin, for example has a very elegant interface element that automatically visualises where you are in the book, including where the current chapter is, where you are in the chapter, and how big the chapter is relation to the whole book. Even a print book can’t do this so elegantly. Brittany has some takeaways from the symposium too, picking up how books need to become beautiful things that provide very specific experiences to matter now. Lauren has another excellent summary, and yes Lauren, ‘automagically’ is a word we use in this space. Sophie also has notes, and loves books and her e-reader (me too, personally, and I’m serious, if you love what books do, rather than what they are as things, then how could you not enjoy some of the qualities digitisation brings?). And now I bring down the count to below 300 with Christopher thinking also about books, their physicality and the digital. For the fetishists out there, it was, oh, about five years ago when people still insisted that digital video would not replace film in high end production, or projection in cinemas. That argument is now over. Don’t even mention photography (because most of us aren’t professional photographers and are happy with our phones’ cameras, yet to a photographer this is a shocking as us as wannabe tv makers thinking using your phone for video is OK – personally I do – and so it is with books, we’re humanities people, books are our thing, but it doesn’t follow that it is everyone else’s, or that it will stay this way).
Unsymposium 0.3 VoxPops
Shannen’s jumbled notes, useful. Anna on what is one of the best blog posts I’ve read for a while. Thoughtful joining the dots, and while I am not sure I used the word “cadence” I wish I had and intend to do so from now on (thanks). Hypertext and new media is a different cadence (see) to literary reading, I have a chapter about it if you’re interested. Cuong also has good notes, picking up that all things have contexts. What we might not have made clear is that context is never, can never, be fixed. It is mercurial, so if all texts have contexts, and contexts are mercyrial, it follows that what we say, what they say, can never be pinned down. Things cannot say what they mean. Alas. Samuel continues to develop an intriguing voice, picking out an impressive range of salient points (think of the experience as peaks and valleys, which you prefer is up to you). And in relation to context, note how different these readings of the 50 minutes are, context, even in the same place at the same time. Mercurial indeed. Rebecca too has notes, and picks up on context and the multiple meanings of hypertext. I’d add more to that, hypertext is not just multiple meanings, but that the thing you read or watch each time changes in itself, so what we read is also multiple. This is important as it is not just that contexts around that book vary, but that when we read the book, each time the book (the words, the paragraphs) are different too. Anna C thinks the subject is like a hypertext, you need to feed the beast and make connections. Yes, and no. It does model a way the network is, you do need to prod it, but we also offer prompts and probes of our own. Torika thinks the bookstore, not the book, is dead. I’d suggest not quite, as a post some time ago celebrating the bookstore in relation to the experience it offers is what makes the valuable. (And why boutique stores have a better future than try to be all chains, hello Borders.) Patrick thinks about hypertext, music and has very interesting ideas about how books and publishing might look to music as a way to define a viable future (think that would be a very smart move).
Reciprocation
I’m going to wield the magical big stick super powers I have a subject coordinator and veto some class decisions that were made about participation in relation to assessment. Specifically, if you claim to do something, and haven’t, then something should happen as a consequence. I’ll explain why, but first I’m doing this not because I think the alternatives developed or other options are wrong, but in the specific context of network media and the trust based assessment model we have adopted we want the idea of trust, reputation, and the concept of a trust or reputation network to be enacted. In this model trust is understood and defined as an obligation you have to another, it is not only a relation you have with yourself. Trust, in this deep sense, is where you have expectations of others and they, in turn, of you. I trust that my friend will do what she says she will do, the people I am collaborating with will do what they say they will do and that I even need to trust other drivers on the road to, pretty closely, follow the road rules, and I will too, so that it isn’t Russian roulette every time I decide to drive a car, or ride a bike.
In this way of thinking about trust we can see that it is not something I can define for myself. It is completely dependent on the judgement of others. It is not up to me to decide that I’m trustworthy – this is up to those that need to trust me to determine. This is similar (not identical, but similar) to how reputation works online. Your reputation as a blogger for example is determined by others judgement, often realised through readership, and more significantly, links in. This is why a twelve year old can be an authoritative fashion blogger, even they when they started they had absolutely no industry reputation or position at all. I could be employed as a fancy professor at an Ivy League university, but when I take up blogging, if my blog isn’t much good, then it simply isn’t much good and its reputation (and potentially mine) will be low. However, as a professor at an Ivy League university I don’t have to do much else to have reputation and authority within the university, simply because it is a hierarchical system and I am, by definition, a long way up towards the top. Being near the top bestows authority – the role and hierarchy guarantee this – whereas when I start blogging, my prestige from my position will probably help, but if I don’t walk the walk in my blog my real world position very rapidly counts for little. This is why we can think of it as a reputation network, because the authority of your blog is determined by others, not by the institutional granting of authority (they are a professor, they must know what they are talking about, they are employed by Vogue, what they think matters more than someone not employed in the fashion industry, they write for a music magazine so must know more than that blogger over there).
The participation assessment is repeating this. It relies on trust as you self audit your participation each week, but it only becomes a trust network when others are able to judge your trustworthiness. Remember, trust is not something you can self define, it relies fundamentally on your conduct in relation to others, and they are the ones who decide. (It is hard to build, easy to break, much harder, if broken, to restore.) Therefore for the participation assessment to become a trust network there needs to be consequences of breaking that trust. What those consequences are, well that I’m less concerned about then making it clear that trust is not something you are able to define for yourself – it is not up to me to claim that I’m trustworthy. I can think I am, I can claim I am, but the proof is what others say about me, not what I say about myself. Why? Because trust relies upon an ethical obligation to an other.
Novels, An Assemblage of Histories
IN today’s unsymposium the discussion wandered around the shop about the essay and the literary. On the way home it sparked a little florid flurry of ideas that arose from that half baked discussion. A couple of weeks ago Actor Network Theory (ANT) was mentioned, and while what follows isn’t specifically ANT, the way to think of it is not as a linear sequence of causes but a network of relationships that could have different sorts of outcomes, and that the novel was one particular one, and more importantly it is this aggregation of different things, at different speeds and moments, that sees the novel happen. In this view it isn’t that the novel is at the end of a process and these are the parts of steps, but that the novel finds itself within all these things that have their own, particular, individual histories and trajectories, parts of which touch the novel. (For example the relationship between making wine and the printing press, these histories touch each other, but one doesn’t ’cause’ the other and the printing press is not the ‘culmination’ of an idea.)
I want to write about the novel because the discussion today begun from there, and it is a very useful example of how to think about what we describe as the specificity of media history not as this narrative of cause and effect, but as a conglomeration of, well, stuff. Ideas, technologies, economics, religion, technological appropriation, cultural transmission, and so on. Now, if I were particular sort of theorist, for example some sort of Marxist, I might decide that one of the parts of what I’ve described as a ‘conglomeration’ is more important than the others, in trying to explain how novels happened (and so as a Marxist I might see the emerging forms of capitalism as essential to the whole thing), but that risks a sort of theoretical chauvinism (why is capitalism any more important than realising the wine press over there would solve the technical problem of applying regular constant pressure to actually be able to print?). Personally, I think it is more elegant, and possibly more accurate, to recognise it is a complex messy assemblage and then try to recognise the terms or parts of this assemblage, and as an assemblage to recognise that the parts have their own histories, and uses, and their role here is not just to somehow give birth to printing and later the novel.
So, the novel. There was a good question today about the literary and the digital and the book. My answer was simply that if you take the literary out of the question then the book is, today, irrelevant as a particular form. It simply doesn’t matter. For some things it remains the most convenient form, but that is rapidly changing. In most contexts most people don’t care if it is a book or not (something on paper, with a cover, made up of serial pages), and in many cases a digital form which is searchable and can be annotated and all the rest is more use to you and preferable to a book. Think court decisions text books, legislation, manuals, diagnostic manuals (technical, medical, psychological) even a copy of Shakespeare that can automatically show you every occurrence of a phrase, in context (what we all a concordance), and then provide links to other occurrences of the similar phrases in other works by Shakespeare. (Once upon a time not so very long ago the complaint about ebooks was that you ‘couldn’t read them in the bath’ – seriously. Then things like the iPad came along, which you could, but if you dropped it… Except if you drop your book in the bath then, well, that’s usually buggered too. Now the complaint is about the smell of the paper, or its feel. Now, seriously, if this what makes literature have literary value, just go and buy some paper be done with it, as this is so very seriously a fetish dressed up as an argument to be embarrassing!)
I digress. Unusually. I want to stick the literary back into the conversation and make the provocative claim that the literary and the book aren’t intimate bedfellows, and might not be in to the future. They were intimate, but they don’t have to be, or, more provocatively perhaps the literary will just have had its moment and fade, to be enjoyed by a small band of academics and buffs, while the world moves along to other things. Why? How?
Let’s keep it simple and think about the novel. The novel needs the book, well, it did. The novel needed:
- the invention of the printing press
- the printing press developed from the innovative appropriation of the wine press (so we needed wine presses first)
- development of new technologies of metal making so that typefaces could be easily made (metallurgy and craft skills)
- the rise of more general literacy (so that there were people able to read books)
- so the development of more generalised education (social changes)
- the invention of cheap paper (as prior to paper manuscripts where handwritten and painted on very expensive leather known as vellum)
- a new ink suitable for printing had to be invented
- the emergence of nascent forms of mercantile capitalism as the original printers generally operated as what today we’d describe as start ups, a printer would arrive in a small town or city, set up a press, and start printing and selling, with mixed success
- the desacralisation of knowledge and stories so that the church was no longer the centre of knowledge production, dissemination and distribution (this was cause and effect)
- with the rise of literacy people didn’t need things read to them, and so the new phenomenon of ‘silent’ reading where those outside of the educated religious elite could now read, and did
- and with the spread of silent reading, of reading by yourself (instead of in church where the bible was read to you since you couldn’t read) the concept of an interior voice arose
- and so novels became stories about the insides of people (what today we’d describe as their thoughts and motivations)
Printing is fundamental here, since paper is flat and small compared to vellum (which is thick and the manuscripts often enormous), and now we have a small, intimate writing intended for an audience of one. And as people wondered what to do with it, they experimented, and we eventually arrive at the modern form of literature we call the novel. Personal, interiorised characters (we wonder and are told about their thoughts and feelings), small enough to be in the home, and linear enough to be read across several sittings, short enough and in the vernacular and so not presuming to require a life times study (aka the bible, classical literature).
Therefore the novel is a confluence of lots of different things. Technologies, cultural changes, individuals, trade routes, emerging capitalism, etc.
Now, one of the founding novels in the west is Don Quioxite, published in two volumes (1605 and 1615). That makes it near enough to 400 years old. We have had writing since 3200BC in the middle east and 1200BC in China. If we take China as our case, then we have had writing for 2800 years before the novel came along. Now, while the novel will still be around when I am in my dotage, and I suspect yours, it seems to be an extraordinary intellectual chauvinism to think that something that has been around for about 12% of the time we’ve had writing (and stories) is the final, privileged forever, definitive and going to stay just where it is thank you very much, narrative form. There is, in the history of narrative and its associated technologies, nothing that supports this view.
Stories on the other hand are a constant, while their media and technical form (oral, prose, song, dance, painting, essay, letter, film, game, serial, novel, lyric, song, word, voice, image, sound, air, light, magnetic tape, digital 0’s and 1’s, chemical reactions – photos, film ) seems to me to be anything but constant. To think that the book, as the vanguard and privileged narrative form, smacks of the same sort of imperialism that assumed, a century ago, that the world wanted to be white, colonised, industrialised and ‘modernised’. A view that made perfectly good common sense now, but which gets no recognition as legitimate today. Print here is our master, and thinking that this is the end or final form or the highest form of narrative, our privileged form, is to be its servants.
We have electronic literature and poetry, so that is already one way in which the literary happily leaves behind the page, ink, and paper. It is minor in relation to all the other literary production that is going on, it might fizzle out, but we have had literature prior to the book, which shows that literature does not have to equal the book, though when it does, the novel is the privileged form. Hence, in these conversations, when we say book most people mean literature, but even then what they actually mean, is the novel. Will the novel continue as our preeminent literary form? I don’t know, but history to date says it is unlikely. This is not the same as saying it will disappear, just that its place will shift.
What has this to do with network media? Well the digital is the place where this is being tested, as we witness the rise of ebooks and in many cases see ebook sales outstripping physical sales. This shouldn’t be surprising, it happened with music several years ago where vinyl is, as the novel might become, one for an informed elite rather than its mass, popular form. But its deeper relevance for network media is simply as a case study to realise it is not a linear series of causes and effects but something like a network where different elements have agency – mechanics, metallurgy, religion, education, secularisation, capitalism, guilds and craft practices, market trading routes (which is how print and printing spread), and so on. It is, a bit (don’t force it too much) like an ecology where if we look at a forest the forest is the product of complex interactions of all its parts, there is no simple cause and effect but instead systems of feedback that include geography, geology, meteorology, soil, species, animals, plants which all have their own time scales, their own speeds, their own histories. Recognising this density is what we need to be able to do, rather than thinking there is an answer, or a specific way of approaching what it might mean, that will make guaranteed sense of it. A forest doesn’t mean anything, it just is. I can make it mean timber for houses, or a habitat for a rare species, or a beautiful view, or a site for a hotel, or an example of indigenous significance, or a place for families, but none of these help you to understand what a forest is. In relation to network media, what we’re doing this semester is beginning to think what the network is, rather than trying to provide ways to try to work out what it means.
Please End It Nicely
Prani is not sure about books without specific endings. Note though, we have lots of examples of stories with indeterminate endings, even in traditional books and films, and also from ‘being swept into an author’s world’ it does not follow that there has to be determined ending. Soap opera is the canonical example of stories that, by definition, don’t end. Dickens is the template. Both have perfectly viable ‘worlds’. But the idea that we’re swept into the author’s world, now that is concept that is going to need some work. If nothing else, one thing university needs to instill is that the relation there needs to be reversed.
Lucy likes that Douglas isn’t a believer that books will die. Though Douglas was writing before the rise of the tablet and ebook readers that actually worked, so I think this claim is a bit more at risk now. Also here as media scholars the material nature of our media becomes problematic. What is a ‘book’ now? And if wrote a novel, and it was only ever available in various ebook formats, is it still a book? Why? At what point would this novel like thing not be a book? And outside of literature, is the book relevant? Why?
Learning Styles
Ella enjoyed the knowledge-able talk, seeing its connections to this subject, and the way in which the internet is changing how media now communicate. I think I wrote it here the other week, and it is worth repeating. The media is now us. It isn’t an institution over there that we ‘use’ but it is, literally, us. Laura-Jayne enjoyed this too, and found the way it was presented much easier to understand.
Blog and Hypertext
Regina struggles to ‘get’ hypertext. While ‘self contained’ hypertexts are what are being discussed your blog has a lot of hypertextual qualities. It doesn’t really have a beginning or an end, it is pretty much all middle. The beginning, the first post, is not really a beginning like the first line of a novel, it is some other sort of beginning. And it doesn’t really have an end. You might think it does, but the link in this post to Regina’s blog, is that now a part of her blog, or not? Why? And the links out from her blog, are they part of the blog? Why? And if this blog post leaves a trackback on that blogpost, automatically, who is writing what, now? And we can arrange the material by category, tag, month, or just default reverse chronological order. So there is no privileged structure to your blog, unlike, say, an essay or a novel. Now, to ‘get hypertext, imagine you wrote a fictional work that had these sorts of qualities. That’s not quite there, but is a step towards what the implications are.
Abby has some good comments and then uses TV as a way to think about how audiences have changed in relation to texts. What she says here is correct, but isn’t really hypertext. In hypertext the actual thing we read/view changes as a result of our actions during the act of our viewing/reading. It is not a choose your own adventure, it is more poetic and complex than this. The most important thing that hypertext teaches is that when we think of narrative (fiction or nonfiction doesn’t matter) online it is the structural relations between its parts that matter. Think of a novel, think of paragraphs. In a novel they have one set of relations, they are serial and fixed. But if a system lets that paragraph maybe sometimes happen after that one, or that one, then how we write, what we write, and how we read, and what a text is, or become strange and different. Abby has another post and here I think the observation that we no longer consume or use media in a linear way is a really important point. As new media professionals we often make the mistake that audiences will treat what we make the way we treat what we make. Politely, from beginning to end, not doing anything else. Yet most of us, most of the time, don’t consume media like this ourselves. We pause, talk over it, skip bits, read in the wrong order, only read some of it, skip that track that you don’t much like. This is how people will use what you make. You can make a 20 minute short film and imagine everyone watching it full screen, headphones on, paying strict attention. But apart from an end of year screening, you and your family, and a small group of afficiandos, everyone else will watch it however. With several windows open, doing several things, not at full screen (sorry, you do not own my computer screen).
Lucy has an excellent quote from Landow about the 4 axes he proposes around the things that hypertext narrative plays with or uses. What is missing is the machine. In hypertext there is reader choice, but I can also make the computer decide things programmatically too. So it isn’t just reader and text but also machine. Lucy has another post too, and the really important idea in this is power. Writing is power, authors have authority. This is power. In hypertext (and the Web generally) the traditional role of power in relation to media, use, consumption is radically altered. In the case of hypertext even in the very form of the work where the author must surrender their authority to control order, in any absolute sense. This is a conversation about power. Who has power, and why.
Joy and Sorrowy
Ned and a very nice post about the excitement and tragedy of hypertextual futures. The dream of thick rich interconnection, versus the risk of losing mystery. It’s a well written proposition. What do you think?