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?
Social media for widespread publication
OED defines social media as websites and applications which enable users to create and share content or to participate in social networking. A crucial point here is that social media users are able to make their material publicly accessible without publishers.
Social media tools provide instantaneous access to published content to broad audience from all over the world. Only in Canada there were approximately 25.3 million social network users in 2018, which are expected to grow to 27.1 million in 2023 (Clement).
Self-publishers in social media benefit from opportunities to attract audience which are not available in non-digital world. Particularly, comments in writing blogs help readers to provide feedback on the text, direct interaction with the writer and other readers. Speakers in the past could communicate with the audience at the time of their public speech only. Today, comments in the platforms for recorded talks connect the speakers with their audience without timing and territorial restrictions. Thus, social media tools provide the space to the readers in the web, where they can act as writers in the context of feedback and interaction with their authors.
Social media remove barriers between authors and their audience and set communication channels between them. The communication works both ways, from authors to the audience, and from the audience to the writers and speakers, with the writing initiative shifted to the audience.
Hypertexts for new horizons
Written texts in the social media are often accompanied by linking structures in the form of hypertext, which pose new opportunities for writers and readers. Each hypertext links the original text with another written text of the same or different author, image, audio, video and other media. In other words, hypertexts functions as a doorway to various web pages reserved on the background of the original text.
Hypertexts challenge the readers by changing the pattern and structure of the narrative. They introduce non-consistent patterns of narration, which switch from written texts to oral or visual representations, building the diverse and expanding body of the story. They create a challenge for writers because hyperlinked texts to other hyperlinked texts act like labyrinths with infinite exits available to readers. In the worst case scenario from the writer’s perspective, readers can be carried away from the original text without return. The only solution to this problem is to write a text, which does not have a chance to be forgotten in the middle of narration. Thus, hypertexts provide unique opportunities to readers to become listeners and viewers, and choose whether to come back to the original story, or continue to explore new horizons.
How these capabilities might be impacting literature and story
Social media tools come to millions of users in many forms. They vary from social networks, writing blogs and forums to visual-sharing platforms and social games. As pointed out by Courtney MacNeil, “the computer does not initiate the dominance of one media form over another, but rather encourages their fusion within the pluralistic realm of the “global village”.
Technological advances provide a unique opportunity to demonstrate the beauty and harmony of integration between various narration techniques. This integration is not forced and not a permanent form, it’s developed to show “the spaces in-between places… where different paths meet and merge, for a time, and then go on their way ”, as concluded in the story at the end of Lesson 1.2 of this course.
Works Cited
Clement, J. “Number of Social Network Users in Canada 2023.” Statista, 2019, Web. January 11 2020. www.statista.com/statistics/260710/number-of-social-network-users-in-canada/.
Courtney MacNeil, “Orality.” The Chicago School of Media Theory. Uchicagoedublogs. 2007. Web. January 11 2020. http://lucian.uchicago.edu/blogs/mediatheory/keywords/orality/
Nielsen Jacob, “History of Hypertext”. Nielsen Norman Group, 1995. Web. January 09 2020. www.nngroup.com/articles/hypertext-history/.
OED/Oxford English Dictionary. Oxford University Press, Web. January 11 2020. https://www-oed-com.ezproxy.library.ubc.ca/
Erika Paterson. “Lesson 1.2” English 372 99C Canadian Studies. Web. January 09 2020. https://blogs.ubc.ca/engl372-99c-2019wc/unit-1/lesson-12/
Hi Joanne,
I really enjoyed your blog post. I wrote on the same question and it’s always interesting to see different perspectives on the same issue.
I’m wondering if you see any potential negatives to this technology. You listed many positives in your appraisal of the different technology we now have at our disposal, but no mention of any dangers. Do you feel there are any?
Thanks,
Cooper
Hi Cooper, thank you for reading my post and your question. I remember your answer on the same question as well as your introductory post :). I think your blog is already remarkable, even though it’s just a start. I like and appreciate what you write, and how you line up your discussions and respond comments.
You are right, my post came out to be rather one-sided and focusing on opportunities, without consideration of side effects and dangers of free publishing. The most prominent downside of publishing without publishers is the quality and amount of information loaded to the www. Under the quality I mean wrong and misleading information, and … language illiteracy (what an irony… I wish someone could edit my posts prior I publish them here lol). As a result, today we have tons of garbage in the web, which make difficult to find reliable and valuable publications. We can compare the www with the ocean. Both are beautiful and powerful, enormous in size and generous in sharing opportunities with us. And both were not created to be polluted and abused.
Joanne
Hi Joanne! Thanks for your post 🙂
I really liked your analogy of hypertexts creating labyrinths with infinite exits for readers. Although that entire paragraph was about hypertexts, I found it very beautiful to read in terms of how it triggered my imagination haha.
To add on to your answer about how social media tools may affect stories and literature, I think these tools also give individuals power to shape the directions of stories and literature. Also, social media–Facebook, Instagram, etc.–enables peripheral stories that counter mainstream stories to more easily move from one individual to a broader audience, leading to faster changing of mainstream narratives. There are also some popular Facebook or Instagram accounts that allows other, maybe less popular, users to send videos, comments, and types of posts to be shared on a bigger account. Individuals have more capacity to share their experiences and perspectives than ever before and this encourages mainstream stories to more quickly become increasingly nuanced and diversified.
-Gaby 🙂
Hi Gaby,
Thank you very much for your comment 🙂 and great addition to the subject. Your points prompted me to think of an analogy of social media space with “democratic” publishing environment in terms of “[availability] to the broad masses of the people” (Merriam-Webster). In turn, printed publications, filtered and edited by publishers, are closer to the “conservative” territory, which are “marked by moderation or caution,… traditional norms of taste, elegance, style, or manners” (Merriam-Webster):).
As Cooper noticed in his comment above, there are positive and negative perspectives for both ways of publishing. I agree to that, and I also believe that digital publications are not meant to replace traditional ones; they are different and they add to each other. Technology advances open new opportunities to authors and their audience, which can be taken or not, there is always a choice.
Joanne