Story & Literature

Lesson 1:2

I elected to answer question number seven, which I copied here for reference:

At the beginning of this lesson I pointed to the idea that technological advances in communication tools have been part of the impetus to rethink the divisive and hierarchical categorizing of literature and orality, and suggested that this is happening for a number of reasons.  I’d like you to consider two aspects of digital literature: 1) social media tools that enable widespread publication, without publishers, and 2) Hypertext, which is the name for the text that lies beyond the text you are reading, until you click. How do you think these capabilities might be impacting literature and story?

To say that the recent and rapid expansion of social media as a platform for content had minimal effect on the concept of digital literature would be the understatement of the decade. In 1961 Leonard Kleinrock wrote a paper entitled “Information Flow in Large Communication Nets.” This paper is where the initial concept that would one day become the world wide web was born. Flash forward to 2001, and you will see that the Internet is fully adopted into at least 50% of all American households.

The University of Washington defines digital literature as texts that have been digitally created, which it to say that they were “digitally born.” It is to be noted that this definition purposefully excludes print literature that has been made available on a digital platform. Further than that, Katherine Hayles, a professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Program in Literature at Duke University, argues that there is a distinction between classical and contemporary digital literature, with the former being defined as “relying heavily on hypertext links” and the latter as “making use of new technological possibilities.”

Hypertext is an interesting concept. To further her definition of digital literature, Hayles defines it as having three central characteristics: “multiple reading paths; text that is chunked together in some way [as lexia on the computer]; and some kind of linking mechanism that connects the chunks together so as to create multiple reading paths.” To add to this, theres something quite engaging about the concept of being able to “click to know more.” You have to want it, which is to say you have to have a spark of curiosity to pursue the hunt for more information. Her concept of a “reading path” is also quite fascinating. It would imply to the reader that they are on a journey with an author, which is a beautiful metaphor.

In addition, information propagates at an incredibly quick pace, once something is on the internet it stays there forever. It’s important to note that the internet is made up of platforms, which includes places like wikipedia, Facebook, and even google,  and platforms are not publishers. The difference might not seem meaningful, but consider how in some countries around the world published content can be, and often is, highly censored or edited.

Now with the context out of the way, the new capabilities of both social media and the use of hypertext have, in my opinion, a huge impact on literature and story. If information can travel as fast as the push of a button, who is to say that the narratives, and to an extent, the stories, that being made available are even true? That being said, who is to say that they’re not? If there was a way to filter everything out until you get to the facts, the possibilities would be endless. People with all different stories and histories to share would have a space they could do so and reach an audience far wider than they ever could otherwise. Unfortunately, the focus of the media, especially socially based media (for example, instagram), is geared towards the present. Often times it seems like we’re always moving on to the next story or the next trend, without taking in to account what has happened historically, or the impact that ignoring it has.

According to Casey Brienza, sociologist and Lecturer in Publishing and Digital Media at City University London ‘All media are platforms of human communication and expression, and in this sense, all media, including literature, is social.’ I think that literature and story are opportunities for connection. We tell stories to connect someone to a place or a time or a history. We write literature to immortalize a moment in time so someone some where or some time else can see the world through our eyes, in our context. I purposefully tried to add as many hypertexts as I could (within reason) and in doing so, I am trying to connect with you, the reader, to the exploration I undertook in trying to answer a question, and there’s no better way to do so than to share the destinations that I visited.

Works Cited

Baker, Francesca. The London Magazine. 30 04 2014. 16 01 2020. <https://www.thelondonmagazine.org/is-social-media-killing-literature-by-francesca-baker/>.

Greenstein, Shane. How the Internet Became Commercial. 2015. 16 01 2020`. <https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691167367/how-the-internet-became-commercial>.

Jarvis, Jeff. Platforms Are Not Publishers. 10 08 2018. 16 01 2020. <https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/08/the-messy-democratizing-beauty-of-the-internet/567194/>

Kleinrock, Leonard. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 31 May 1961. 16 01 2020. <https://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/data/files/Kleinrock/Information%20Flow%20in%20Large%20Communication%20Nets.pdf>.

Washington, University of. Classical AestheticsDigital Age. n.d. 16 01 2020. <http://courses.washington.edu/asthetik/sven_digital.html>.