It was late. Armageddon22 was three hours late for work in his part of the world. Daisyswillrerise was three hours late for bed. Godschosenwitness was missing school. RedRoversOnPluto had nothing better to be doing. Jumpindon’tlook was bored one morning. So, “Jump” logged in to an online chat-she’d heard that might be fun from a friend, and wanted to try it.

(Who knows if any of these anonymous pseudonyms is male or female or something less socially definable, but since language doesn’t really seem to have evolved to support story telling without the use of gendered pronouns, let’s alternate, and think of them as the meaningless place holders they are.)

Anyway, back to Jump, who clicked around chat groups, insulated communities of all shapes and sizes, no definable location or segregation, except for their closed off attitude, their exclusive interest in one topic or area of life, imposing societal boundaries on a medium that could theoretically work just fine without them. Then, he found them. A group who seemed to be having fun, telling scary stories, like they were sitting around an exclusively anonymous global campfire. They were faceless, but distinctive. Colour Jump intrigued. She clicked “Join”.

Seconds later, accepted without reservation, he was thrown into an insanely competitive universe, a contest to scare one or other of their group off the internet for the night/day/moment, where ever they really were. They were all in the now, the moment, the relativistic present that was different for every one of them, and would be the past when the future arrived seconds later. Their activity lists, liked books, favourite movies, friends lists, user pics, and archived chats were so different, there was no relation between any of them.

Daisy was quiet, liked books and music and shades of pink and mauve and baking, a stereotype to fit with the first part of her pseudonym, on which an ironic pale was cast by the rest of her choice.

Armaggedon liked guns, heavy metal, and the good ol’US of ‘A-another stereotype, edged in shades of green.

RedRover liked space and red, Godschosen liked bible verses and church groups.

Are they having me on?, thought Jump. Is anyone really this one dimensionally stereotypical?

Still, Jump being no coward, he jumped right in to compete. The challenges got wilder and wilder-ghost stories, disaster stories, retold horror movies, invented horror movies, grisly tales of horror and death that left violent nightmares in their wake.

Jump was somehow being pulled into a world he wasn’t prepared for, something outside of his ordinary existence, something wild and untamed and crazy. She was loving every terrifying minute.

Then, it was suddenly his turn to present the ultimate challenge to the group. Everyone else had presented spine chilling tales, each out competing the last. This was it. Go big or go home, in or out. Win or lose. Jump had no intention of losing.

War. Hate. Horror.Supernatural insanity. Murderous terror.Friendly fire, terrorism, government corruption, corporate rot and disease, murder, mayhem, atrocities untold. Images, words, videos, pictures.

Jump had never mentioned she was a world class hacker. He could spin anything to look like anything, weave a story of imagination with threads of truth to create a narrative unparalleled in its believable depravity.

She pressed post, simultaneously broadcasting it. The response was cacophonous. Horror, disgust, outrage-no. Admiration, respect, awe-yes. But also, fear, worry, even terror.

Everyone agreed Jump had won unequivocally. RedRover, however, suggested he might have gone a bit far.

Daisy said “more than a bit not good there man.”

Armageddon forwarded him a link about Pandora’s box, with the tagline “might want to not leave that post up, as brilliant as it was.”

Godschosen said “we don’t need more pain in the world. Delete it, and be grateful we’re online where you can do that sort of thing; take back something you’ll regret.”

Jump “listened” politely, and then drew their attention to a live news feed on the edge of the blog.

They hadn’t known Jump was a hacker, and a very good one. They also hadn’t known Jump hated to lose, at anything.

The post had gone viral, sent to every major network on the planet simultaneously. With one click of a button, the world exploded into chaos and evil incarnate, all because of one story.

Jump posted one last time, before blinking out of existence like she’d never been there at all, “Next time, remember that in the modern world, nothing can ever really be deleted or taken back. Once it’s loose, once it’s out there, once a story has been told, it’s out there forever, and it can never be called back, never be taken back. Think before you type next time.”

I told this story to my brother and some of my friends, all of whom quite like stories about hacking and internet conspiracies. I discovered a couple things. First, they were astonished to find that this story was “taken” from another source with such a different setting, but still conveyed the same message, or attempted to.

Second, everyone I shared it with wanted to know exact details about what the story of horror was. In fact, the most intriguing aspect of the story for everyone seemed to be the level of suspense and horror it shows. Like horror films, the story awakened a primal thirst for violence and chaos in the people hearing it. Well, that’s one theory anyway.

My brother thought it was a cautionary tale, like a didactic poem from the 19th century, warning against the dangers of social media and hacking. My friends were intrigued by the ending, spending quite a while trying to come up with an explanation for who or what Jump was, and whether the ending was an elaborate hoax, a government trap, or what really happened.

I also discovered upon telling this by heart, that it was far too wordy to remember everything(I’d written it down first before memorizing it), and that it changed quite a bit in my verbal retelling-originally, Jump was the innocent party, not the hacker. Also, my listeners suggested additions and subtractions(there were two other characters originally, and Armageddon worked for the FBI). Also, as you may have noticed, mirror inconsistencies in the continuity of the narrative showed up as I told it(nobody left the internet after Jump won). I left them in for authenticity’s sake.

In the verbal retelling, I found hidden depths to both versions of the story. By retelling it both in person and online, I found myself thinking about the differences between oral and written stories once again, and the blurring  of the lines between the two due to the internet. After all, as Jump said, social media gives us a far greater opportunity to circulate stories, and makes it all but impossible to call those stories back once they’re out there.

Works Cited:

King, Stephen. “Why We Crave Horror Movies.” American Culture and the Media. (1981): 504-508. Web. May 29, 2014.

“Pandora’s Box.” Myths and Legends. E2BN, 2006. Web. May 29, 2014.

Greetings,

This post is a response to question 7 in lesson 1.2, and will attempt to address the ways in which aspects of “digital literature” are “impacting literature and story” in the modern world (Paterson, Lesson 1.2).

I am eight years old, sitting at my parents old desktop computer, the one that still has to use the phone line to connect to the rather primitive internet connection. I’m on a mission, a quest, like the Arthurian Knights I love to dress up as. I’m on the hunt for stories, expanding on a literature that I’ve recently devoured like the starving little cub I am. I am hungry for knowledge, in this case knowledge about an era that hasn’t yet earned the title “steam-punk”. I don’t even know how to spell the name properly, but with the tenacious fervor of the young, I doggedly pursue primitive search engines for any new material to sate my insatiable obsession. Having consumed everything Sir Arthur Conan Doyle has ever written about his erstwhile detective, I’m searching for some new literature, a new story to capture my imagination, but with those same beloved characters. I discover the world of pastiches and parodies(they’ve updated a little in recent years), long before I know what the words mean, scrolling through antiquated pages of text that are mere cue cards in digital form. These pages contain no extra information, not even the hyperlinks which I will later take for granted when browsing for information, instead I’m forced to write things down to look up on a new page later. It is laborious, and mostly fruitless, and my first attempt at internet searching. I’m looking for something that doesn’t really exist yet, in a world of cutting edge technology that hasn’t quite left the old world behind yet, hasn’t quite matured, much like its user.

I am ten, finding my first ever online Holmes story, printing over a hundred pages which I quickly loose in dust and time, bookmarks still a physical object stuck between the pages of my favourite novels.

I am twelve, discovering a world which I’ve only dreamed of, where anyone can write something down, expanding on existing literature, or inventing a whole new story, imperfect in its gloriously unpolished creativity.

I am fourteen, discovering my tribe through a digital medium, scattered across half the globe and yet right beside my desk.

I am sixteen, an auditory learner doing distance ed-i.e., reams and reams of printed digital text that makes no sense really- who has always struggled with math, suddenly pulling straight As because the teacher chooses an alternative teaching method, posting recorded videos of himself walking one through the steps to solving equations, teaching orally from a completely different city.

I am nineteen, a decade long Tolkien fanatic who suddenly finds a like minded individual to geek out with, using Yahoo Messenger to have a virtual conversation, words typed, tantalizing pauses between key taps instead of breaths, but no less oral, no less “real”.

I am twenty-one, clicking a link on my instructor’s blog, discovering added information about a topic which enriches my reading and learning experience, and engages me with the dialogue in a deeper way, by drawing me in to the topic, that coloured text daring me to click, to discover, to join the conversation and the rest of the world.

The narrative above is designed to highlight some of my own personal experiences with digital forms of literature. As highlighted above, digital mediums such as social media and hyperlinks fundamentally change and reinvent the way we perceive stories and literature, rewriting them, adding depth and layers of meaning which were previously unstated. In the case of the hyperlink, enabling us to learn more about a topic with the click of a button. This is both amazing, but perhaps also damaging. If finding information is now that easy, surely more people will learn about a given topic. But, what happens to traditional research skills. Are they no longer relevant? And what about our imagination? If everything is explained by the click of a button, what is left to the reader’s imagination? Are we no longer passive readers, or were we ever passive at all?

Hypertext’s effect on literature and stories is perhaps more about structure and format than content or medium. In other words, hyperlinks add extra layers of information, and make accessing information much faster and easier, but often act much in the same way appendixes, footnotes, reference books or dictionaries would in printed texts. However, hypertext takes this added information to a whole new level, allowing readers to access information and make connections which ordinary text simply doesn’t have the layers or tools to provide access to. Landow of Brown University suggests that by “emphasizing connections and relations” hypertext “changes the way texts exist” and “the way we read them”(Landow, 1989). This highlights the connection MacNeil makes between orality and digital media, suggesting that digital mediums, in this instance hypertext, could perhaps function as a form of orality, providing information as instantly as if someone was speaking it to another person.

Perhaps an even more obvious change in literature and stories since the advent of social media is the increasing ease with which informal publications, writings, and stories can be circulated, often unedited or published, and even more often for no profit at all. My own personal experience lies more in the world of the so-called “Fanfiction” phenomena, which involves the informal, non-profit publication and sharing of fan writings about existing literatures-the ultimate answer to that hungry questing eight year old.

In more mainstream spheres, the world of blogging has fundamentally changed who can allow their voice to be heard, and who can tell a story and have some expectation that more than the handful of people they meet will ever hear it. More recently, sites like Twitter, Tumblr, or Facebook have created features which not only allow stories to be circulated, but allow the authors-and the rest of the world-to know that someone is listening. Reblogging and retweeting can cause one story or idea to be nearly instantly circulated between millions of people, creating an entire new literature of thought and ideas, seconds after the original “author” posted. Tumblr and Twitter also raise points in favour of MacNeil’s observations, as audio and visual files and links become intermixed with text, creating the so-calleld “mixed media” of social media. In these ways, readers become listeners, observers become authors, those who previously have no voice and no way of being heard have an avenue to circulate their stories and ideas. And yet, just as Chamberlin points out in his story about the man who declined to tell his stories because nobody would understand them any longer, it’s not enough to just have a platform to speak on. People have to be willing to listen. Even more importantly, people have to be willing to listen with the realization that it’s possible they won’t understand what they will hear.

References:

Chamberlin, Edward. If This is Your Land, Where are Your Stories? Finding Common Ground. AA. Knopf. Toronto. 2003. Print.

Fanfiction: Unleash Your Imagination. Fanfiction.net., 1998. Web. May 22, 2014.

Landow, George P. “Hypertext in Literary Education, Criticism, and Scholarship.” Computers and the Humanities. 23.3 (1989): 173-198. Web. May 23, 2014.

Livejournal. Livejournal, Inc., 1999. Web. May 21, 2014.

Louden, Jennifer. “Find Your Tribe.” Jennifer Louden: Savor & Serve. Jennifer Louden, 2012. Web. May 22, 2014.

MacNeil, Courtney. “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web.

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1.2: Story and Literature.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genre. UBC, 2014. Web. May 22, 2014.

Redmond, Chris. “Sherlockian.net: Traditional and Print Pastiches.” Sherlockian.net. Chris Redmond, 2014. Web. May 22, 2014.