Notes on Jeff Rice The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media

Notes on Jeff Rice The Rhetoric of Cool: Composition Studies and New Media

Rice focuses (conceives) nonlinear, multiple theme (theory) compositions as visual phenomena, whether static, printed, alphabetic book form or its successors (see page 134). Carry his methodology into the high fidelity audio production and reproduction technologies past and present. From the conversion of low level audio input wire pairs to Ogg Vorbis and database driven playlists a suite of projects for ENC 2411C (or whatever its course label) is conceivable so that, from instance to instance of the teaching of the course, a growing body of work emerges that can be studied while continuing to perform the intended goal of educating students in digital literacy. The problem with narratives is the large number - take for instance the possible stories involving the push button device - of instances that would have to be traversed (read) in order to judge the validity or soundness of the system as a whole. Placing multiple narratives on the same or inferior level as system integrations takes us beyond logocentrism although perhaps not beyond reliance upon determinism to support our thoughts in cyberspace. (Note the corruption this new version of OpenOffice Writer performs upon the HTML file document by changing the name of the image to its own sub language expression. This is how cyberspace breaks down.) Something in Rice I do not appreciate: the distinction between URI and URL as highly relevant to his argument. Fall into Rice notes around page 122 where the URI versus URL is explained. Arrive at a conclusion similar to his praise of Everything2.com contrasted to the failure of HP's Cooltown. The projects will live by a similar logic as the writers engaging in the works hosted on the site. Projects for the digital literacy course under the heading “science and technology of cyberspace” can include interfacing blogs (Blogger and possibly Wordpress) and delicious (a social bookmarking service) via their APIs, either as new work or part of existing FOSS projects. Over time a portfolio of software projects related to digital literacy will be formed, much like the end-user creations typically associated with literary production.

Juxtapose a box labeled “Electronics Junk” with two of its items, one remediating the terrorist appropriation of electronic devices formerly neutral and irrelevant to the differentiation between evil and positive uses, and the other a more complex interconnection between the old but still in use RCA audio stereo phono jacks and category 5 twisted pair (used for IEE 802.3 Ethernet).

Foreword: Elementary Cool

Gregory L. Ulmer

(XI) The research (and teaching) challenge for the language and literature disciplines today is not to follow in the footsteps of Plato and Aristotle but to seek what they sought. . . . One may learn all the tricks of Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, CSS/DHTML and still be anelectrate. The Rhetoric of Cool is an invitation to Composition Studies to take up this paradigmatic project: the invention of electracy.

(XI-XII) Heuretics (the term is related to “eureka” and “heuristics”) uses theory for the generation of new kinds of works, as distinct from hermeneutics, which applies theory to the interpretation of existing texts. . . . The poetic generator producing these innovations may be described with an acronym: CATTt, standing for Contrast, Analogy, Theory, Target and tale.

(XIII) Analogy in this case is filled with an array of the creative practices that Rice summarizes in the term cool, defined, as he notes, chorally (that is, using every meaning of the term). . . . At one level the approach reminds us of one of the peculiarities of our discipline, which is that we study about our inventors but rarely consider learning anything from them with respect to our own practices.

Introduction

(3) Why composition studies has not integrated these meanings into its curriculum and why composition studies has not felt cool to be an important rhetoric are questions that motivate the development of what I call the rhetoric of cool.

(6) I am attempting to write against that status quo by arguing the cool writer as not cool for her identity (or how she has adopted the popular cool identity) but rather how she is cool for the ways she uses specific rhetorical practices to make meaning in electronic environments.

(8) With cool, I find that chora, appropriation, juxtaposition, commutation, nonlinearity, and imagery are the rhetorical moves that comprise a specific new media writing I am inventing.

1 The Story of Composition Studies and Cool

(11) My story is about how cool and composition studies maintain overlapping narratives that commence in 1963.

(13) Marshall McLuhan employed “cool” to describe the high-participatory nature of certain media forms (TV, the telephone, comic books) as opposed to the low-participatory characteristic of other forms he called “hot” (film, radio, print). At the same time, in Blues People, Amiri Baraka used “cool” to describe the African-American reaction to a white, oppressive authority as calm, noninvolved, detached. Meanwhile, Robert Farris Thompson, working in West Africa and later recording his observations in Flash of the Spirit, discovered that African-American terms like cool have their origins in indigenous, African societies such as the Yoruba, who use it as a form of visual writing in order to express in art and aesthetics a lifestyle characteristic of appeasement, conciliation, and calmness. Together, these writers discover cool as something beyond its immediate and established connotations of popularity or personality. . . . Yet why have these moments found themselves excluded from composition studies' historical narrative?

The Grand Narrative

(14) What Havelock calls “the oral problem” (the importance of orality and its history to literacy and meaning making), I call the digital problem, the understanding that rhetorics of digital culture have been circulating and discussed since the field's rebirth even if composition studies has not paid attention to these rhetorics in a significant way.

(16) I'm not critiquing North when I problematize the grand narrative; I am critiquing how that narrative remains unchallenged and accepted as de facto history, how its recitation continues to be sounded out in our conferences, journals, and work, how it has become, in Foucault's language, the permanence of a theme.

1963

(18) What I pose, then, is one alternative, one re-presentation, one sub/version meant to draw us out of a dominant re-presentation in circulation today.

(21) The practice I call the rhetoric of cool will not be instrumental . . . . Instead, this book will define a rhetorical practice conducive and generalizable to digital culture.

Rhetoric and Writing

(22) Academic figures like Weaver, Booth, and Corbett searched for ways to change the apparatus. They chose, though, to reinstate an old form in place of the emerging new.

(23) Basing their studies on the concept of the student as variable, these texts [Research in Written Composition and Themes, Theories, and Therapy], which have become two of the most influential 1963 theoretical works on composition pedagogy, attempt to transfer composition pedagogy from a hodgepodge collection of anecdotes and teaching stories to the clear and coherent reasoning of how classroom practice can best succeed. They keyword in this kind of research is control, control over who and what are being studied, and control over how these studies are employed to maintain some degree of standardized practice.

(25) I am curious as to how those individuals writing in 1963 could have missed the technological, visual, or cultural influences occurring around them as they made their claims.

(27) The unification of theory and practice is a widely circulated trope seldom acted upon in the manner I am attempting: to write both a textbook and a theoretical book on the same subject.

(28-29) Like Lev Manovich in his influential text The Language of New Media, I want to draw attention to specific rhetorical features conducive to new media what Manovich calls the “general tendencies of a culture undergoing computerization” (27). In place of Manovich's interests in databases, variability, transcoding, and other applications, I discuss these six rhetorical principles I have found conducive to cool. . . . To produce knowledge in what McLuhan names “The Gutenberg Galaxy,” we are obligated to learn the rhetoric of a newly emerging electronic apparatus centered in acts of appropriation, sampling, hacking, and other related moves.

2 Chora

(33) The topoi have served print-based writing instruction by allowing students (and often instructors) the ability to work from a common repository of ideas. . . . But, as I will show, the danger might be more with our dependence on the topoi in the age of new media.

(33-34) Cool as cultural studies, cool as technology, and cool as visual writing all individually operate from different topos-based positions. My usage of all these positions at once is associative, not categorical or permanent, as the Aristotelean method demands. Gregory Ulmer names this strategy I employ chora, a hyper-rhetoric practice that updates the topoi for new media. . . . Ulmer names this electronic writing practice “chorography” and offers a set of instructions for how to be a chorographer: “do not choose between the different meanings of key terms, but compose by using all the meanings” (Heuretics 48).

(35) Cool media operate by a choral logic: Users of a given term's various meanings must actively engage with those meanings in rhetorical ways, discovering unfamiliar and unexpected juxtapositions of these meanings as they compose. Readers, too, respond to chora in a participatory manner unlike typical definitions of meaning or analytical understandings.

(35-36) The link is indicative of a new media push to reorganize space in terms of meaning construction. Through new media applications, like the hyperlink, chora displaces how a given topos represents one idea for one situation. . . . Th performative nature of the rhetoric of cool demands that I, too, enact some portion of that activity throughout my own theorization.

A Choral Introduction to Cool

(36) Reading Eric Havelock's description of 1963 as an important moment in writing instruction, I found myself focusing on his comment that “startled recognitions of a host of related facts” can be located within any given moment deemed consequential for one reason or another.

(38) Like American Graffiti, these types of songs construct the feeling of cool through writing; they are compositions.

(39) This initial recognition, that cool can be situated in 1963 in a manner unlike the tough guy or stereotypical African-American (or even white) male image, prompted me to identify its rhetorical potential as chora. . . . The larger implication of this discovery is the awareness of how an idea crosses several genres (film, music, popular beliefs) while maintaining its overall meaning structure.

(40) To create a chorography of cool, I realize, is in many ways to create a modified keywords for new media. It is to write a word through its connections and meanings, and not necessarily to only write about that word.

Chorography

(41) Baraka's identification, however, does not do that but instead contextualizes Brown's writing in terms of political and social response, thus evoking the project of cultural studies at the same time the Center for Contemporary Cultural Studies was establishing itself in Birmingham, England, as a site of cultural analysis and pedagogical practice. . . . The relationship between media and society is prominent in Baraka's definition of cool. Cool, Baraka writes, includes the specific kind of early 1960s African-American inability to control political and cultural oppression. . . . Baraka's description of cool as nonparticipatory contrasts McLuhan's notion of cool as a highly participatory media form. . . . The conflicts in meaning regarding participation are not obstacles but rather potential moments for invention.

(42) Cool, or ituti, indicates a form of visual writing employed in order to express in art and aesthetics a lifestyle characteristic of appeasement, conciliation, and calmness. Yoruban culture articulated cool as a visual aesthetic in sculpture, weaving, and dance. . . . Any kind of computer-oriented rhetoric must account for the iconic display of information. . . . My visualization of cool, which I start to map out in this chapter, opens up a new arrangement for me to compose with, one that is chora-based and not topos-based.

Ironically, his map is all made of words.

The Handbook

(43-44) Too concerned with the division and arrangement of separate and distinct categories to study (which we can today recognize as modes, process, punctuation, or types of grammatical error), the Ramist tradition hinders the handbook's potential to voice inventive rhetorical moves and gestures. . . . Both McLuhan and Burroughs situate the handbook as a new media collection whose role is to demonstrate and teach rhetorical production.

What did Foucault say about the specificity of Greek hypomnemata?

(44) The focus of these assignments is the exploration of a given term (which is up to the student's discretion) relevant to the student's area of study (Nursing, Education, Accounting, Biology, etc.).

(45) Placed on the Web, students can further explore the choral moves they discover through hyperlinks and image placement. . . . While it is “open” in the sense that it encourages readers to contribute to its development, Wikipedia's entries, layout, and organization do not convey multiple meanings and choral possibilities.

Clearly an API to Wikipedia could render fascinating new organizations and layout of entries.

(45-46) Each chapter signifies a rhetorical dimension of cool but also stands for another choral move I make. In other words, The Rhetoric of Cool is itself a handbook. The significance, therefore, is twofold: to demonstrate the rhetoric of cool (and thus evoke the performative nature or writing) and to pose a model that can be appropriated for other kinds of hyper-rhetorical work (the writing itself).

3 Appropriation

(48) there exists a different type of rhetorical stance I am seeking to create, one dependent not on balance but on how terms or ideas are appropriated (cool as appropriated from media, from music, from Yoruban visuality).

Cool Cities

(51) Because both Detroit and Netscape appropriate cool to perform these tasks, I will use this chapter to include appropriation within the rhetoric of cool. The overlap of my work on cool, my own move to Metro Detroit, and the initiation of Detroit's urban renewal plan mark a focal point for thinking about how the rhetoric of cool functions through the city's appropriation of the word.

The Cool City

(54) Detroit is a cool city not because of anything specific it has done (or not done) but rather because of how one individual appropriates imagery and ideas in order to construct a new place of meaning. I'm particularly interested in how Granholm's appropriation of cool marks an extension of what Amiri Baraka critiqued in 1963 as the consequence of white cultural appropriation. . . . I want to situate Baraka's identification of appropriation as cool within a rhetorical strategy suitable for electronic writing.

Baraka

Appropriation

(59) These kinds of discrepancies regarding appropriation in popular culture are detailed by Thomas Frank in The Conquest of Cool, Malcom Gladwell in “The Coolhunt,” and Douglas Rushkoff in his PBS documentary Merchants of Cool. These writers note how the rhetoric of cool is often transformed into a complacent discursive strategy when coherence is the ultimate goal.

The same docile bodies as those conditioned by traditional rhetoric (calmed down by selecting thesis statement and clearly arguing through it from introduction to conclusion).

The How-To

(63) In digital culture, the cut-up is best exemplified in practices ranging from Web site construction (appropriating images and HTML code from other sites to create new sites) to Weblogs (cutting and pasting links) to hip-hop and DJ culture (appropriating sounds and music, remixing them, and generating new compositions).

It is also exemplified in the IT integrators mash up of operating systems, and programmers remixing source code modules.

The Sampler

The DJ

The Mix

(72) Using appropriation within the rhetoric of cool allows writers to write outside of the limitations of student writing and, therefore, to fully enjoy other forms of writing that occupy their media lives; in other words, writers juxtapose these other forms to their lives.

Making useful, durable digital media objects from assignments projects the student's interest beyond the limited scope of throw away homework assignments principally tutorial and not necessarily practical or even sound taken at face value.

4 Juxtaposition

(73) In this 1963 essay “A Conceptual Framework for Augmenting Man's Intellect,” Douglas Engelbart proposed that juxtaposition be the focal point of writing with computers.

(79) The ideology of the thesis - that writing (and thus research) depends on a single statement or idea - has led the initial CCCC call to not be fully answered. Indeed, the call for debate regarding composition pedagogy (generalized in the research paper issue) never has extended to include how writers juxtapose, or how writers organize ideas spatially, as Lev Manovich argues in The Language of New Media. Spatial composing, Manovich's term for multilayered new media composition, reflects how new media artifacts contain a “hierarchy of levels” (xxv). . . . Spatial composing is a process - the ability to navigate and display disparate elements on encounters - as well as compositional - the writing one does. McCrimmon's pedagogy of the thesis, however, is not spatial; it directs writers to see each step of writing as a separate, distinct moment (first the facts, then the conclusion, then the organization).

Hypertext

(81) The cool writings of Everything2.com actualizes much, though not all, of Nelson's initial concept of hypertext as a writing space outside of what Nelson calls “the paperdigm.”

The DJ (Remixed)

(91) writers must perform juxtapositions, not just offer critical analysis of juxtapositions' effects on a given readership.

Hip-Hop Pedagogy

5 Commutation

(93) Commutation is the exchange of signifiers without concern for referentiality. In the 1964 English translation of Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes defines commutation as an important writing strategy writers employ to make specific choices regarding meaning construction.

(96) Cool discourse, as Baudrillard defines it, challenges writing instruction to reimagine the notion of a permanent writing space based on a fixed (and real) experience.

All meaning exchangeable like memory in a computer. The importance of the dynamically redrawn video screen supplanting the teletype and static, printed page.

Commutation

Scorpio Rising/Flaming Creatures

The Mix

6 Nonlinearity

(113) “The structure of ideas are not sequential. They tie together every which way. And when we write, we are always trying to tie things together in non-sequential ways” (Dream Machine 29, emphasis Nelson's).

Compare to computer systems structure as appearing to try to tie together the overall sense of the system including worlds beyond the system input and output interfaces: supervisory control models may be among what we try to tie together in non-sequential ways. The point is that they do exhibit virtual sequences depending on how they are interpreted.

(115) Nonlinearity asks, as Manovich might argue, that writers identify complex sets of data and form multiple texts out of the data.

(116) what matters is the various overlapping, nonsequential strands that one does not choose among but composes with simultaneously. In other words, even though I tell a narrative about composition studies and cool, I do so from multiple strands (technology, cultural studies, and writing), rather than one strand of causality or narrative progression, or, as traditional hypertext studies emphasizes, individual, alternative routes. I see these multiple strands not as something that hypertext or any other new media form brings to writing but rather as the very relations among ideas that comprise new media itself - that is, the multiplicity is the rhetoric.

(116-117) “Data banks are the Encyclopedia of tomorrow,” Lyotard writes. . . . Among choices and alternatives, among differing threads of data, then, hypertext opens up the possibility of writing. The search engine embodies one possibility, but there is the potential for other possible writing formations as well. . . . Google might serve as one example of this database logic, as Johnson-Eilola notes, but nonlinear writing in general can perform this work as well.

(118) Burroughs's media environment is a database too large to call itself anything other than an “intersection,” at content and sentence structure levels. A writer following Burroughs's logic presens strands of thought and ideas compiled to a given audience, noting where they intersect instead of where they tell a story.

(11) Taking McLuhan's usage of nonlinearity, then, I want to concentrate on how it rhetorically functions in cool, and how it suggests alternative narrative forms. . . . In general, nonlinearity challenges our understanding of how we order information in the digital. It also poses complex methods of information construction and distribution beyond what current writing instruction allows. . . . Janangelo's response to the everything-can-be-included nature of nonlinear hypertexts is to ask what kinds of models composition studies might learn from in order to teach this open-ending writing.

The Kerouac Model

(120) Jack Kerouac represents a specific 1963 literary moment when writing adopts nonlinearity for rhetorical purposes.

(122) The formation of associative, nonlinear thoughts is itself a composing process reflective of digital media. To bring together these experiences at once, Big Sur instructs, write them as nonlinear points.

(122-123) Berners-Lee's concept of URIs (Universal Resource Identifiers, transitive addresses that tell browsers where to find information) as opposed to the currently used URLs (Uniform Resource Locators, the version in place today on the Web that is more static than URIs) relies on a semantic system of writing (like Ulmer's chorography or Kerouac's associative linking) at the level of cool.

(123) In an interview with Technology Review, Berners-Lee . . . we'll be able to write programs that will actually help because they'll be able to understand the data out there rather than just presenting it to us on the screen. (Frauenfelder)

(123) At the technological level, the “relationship” tag, rel=”,” is introduced so that the tag that links pages and ideas, , becomes . At the content level, the connections writers generate come from how the data is associated to other data and how writers actualize those associations in their rhetorical choices. . . . In these systems, markup tags (meta information attributes attached to a word or image) function as semantic exchange. . . . The emphasis, in choral fashion, is not causal effect but meaning relationship, however arbitrary such meanings may, at first, appear.

(124) Del.icio.us, in particular, changes the very hierarchical structuring bookmarking initially relied upon (as early browsers followed the logic of print culture) by allowing writers to “name” their own identifiers for the places they visit on the Web. . . . Writers who compose via Del.icio.us construct nonlinear organizational systems for other writers to read or (knowingly or not) contribute to.

You completely miss out on challenging “hierarchical structuring” if you do not try something like Rice describing those who “compose via Del.icio.us.” Likewise, I am suggesting that these projects creating IT systems that continue beyond your time in the course enacts multiple narratives, lessons and critiques. The question is whether to let the rigorous development of a particular thesis disappear.

(125) Currently, we find the most widely applied semantic moves in Web sites that track user usage or purchasing habits. . . . Rather than ask how we can avoid the traps such writing poses for our consumer habits, we should ask how can we use such media for a composition-oriented cool writing.

The 'oracle' inside Google: important to know about scientific and technical [limits/possibilities (striked out)] to envision possibilities.

Cooltown

(125-126) In this mix of education and corporate investment, semantic writing is further related to cool in Hewlett Packard's conflation of a futuristic society that combines pedagogy and technology into an environment called Cooltown. . . . Cooltown promises to construct a society of nonlinear connections through the existing apparatus of the World Wide Web by promoting a specific commercial vision. Business meetings, catching the bus, ordering coffee, and other activities all become an interconnected experience driven by global satellite positioning systems and Web sites.

(126-127) Cooltown transforms the physical environment and the rhetorical strategies we associate with permanence and physicality into nonlinear spatial positionings. In Cooltown, writers compose on the fly, to a variety of places at once, from a variety of positions at once. . . . [“Cooltown: The Ecosystem Explained”] Once bookmarked, URLs can be sent to remote web locations, or beamed directly to a variety of web appliances using a beaming technology we call “e-squirt.” . . . “Squirting” URIs in (sic) a assortment of directions at once from a multitude of locations could force levels of McLuhan's interactivity we haven't yet digitally experienced and could encourage writers to seek out connections in their writings that neither narrative nor traditional argumentation can account for. It could generate a new media pedagogical vision, as Hewlett Packard claims it will do.

(128) To return to McLuhan's point regarding education and marketing, with cooltown@school, Hewlett Packard seems content with building a system that only reestablishes the logic of print (thus excluding how marketing can shape technology) and does not structure a nonlinear writing world.

(129) Cooltown@school is based not on a database model nor on a nonlinear system of communication and writing, as it seems to claim, but on already familiar pedagogical methods that are superimposed onto the idea of a massive, all inclusive “Web portal.”

(129) Cooltown@school resembles many of the course management systems already in circulation in a variety of colleges and universities.

Notice Rice allows a capitalized Cooltown and the previous lowercase cooltown@school (and one with a .com suffix) to coexist without questioning whether they point to the same thing.

(130) Cooltown@school.com and WebCT signify the construction of a pedagogical apparatus that does not reflect the practices it proposes teaching. . . . As “connected” as these sites may claim to be, the computer languages that structure such connections - either hyperlinks or more complex markup systems like XML and XHTML - are never taught. . . . In other words, how “lifelong” is this experience that is restricted to one kind of licensed platform? . . . the norm favors restriction in place of openness. Instead of basing their systems on the rhetoric of cool, these operations continue the nonmedia compositional tradition I have situated in 1963.

Nonlinear Writing

(131-132) Picture the student engaging with these lines of thoughts not as prompts to be developed into single standing essays but as the structure of the essay itself, interwoven threads of discursive relationships. . . . Everything2.com provides an electronic version of Burroughs's passage; each thread expands and shrinks on the amount of writers engaged with the site and the compositional decisions they make.

(132) Nonlinearity and restricted theses do not work in conjunction with one another; the choice for the thesis is a choice against nonlinearity. The compositional image of writing has thus been restricted.

7 Imagery

(134) The absence of visuality in composition studies' rebirth narrative and its consequent delay in reaching our disciplinary vocabulary can be associated with a long-standing tradition in rhetoric and writing of favoring the word over the image, what Jacques Derrida terms logocentrism.

(135) In much of today's pedagogy, the preference is for writing about images, not with images. The preference is still for the word.

Sketchpad

(137) Ivan Sutherland's 1963 invention of Sketchpad (and related doctoral dissertation Sketchpad: A Man-Machine Graphical Communication System) equated writing with visual expression.

(138) Sketchpad refigured the writing space from paper to the visual screen. Sutherland introduced his dissertation accordingly: . . . Heretofore, most interaction between men and computers has been slowed down by the need to reduce all communication to written statements that can be typed; in the past, we have been writing letters to rather than conferring with our computers. (Sutherland 1) . . . Photosho's ability to manipulate, copy, distort, fabricate, and erase visual displays at will ties into McLuhan's understanding of the visual as cool. Through these visual moves, writers extend a variety of ideas and feelings in way sprint does not allow for; writers create new kinds of discursive worlds that go beyond the flatness of the page.

(138-139) Sketchpad began the process of demonstrating the rhetorical potential of the visual to all writers (and not just painters and artists). A writer is asked to use Sketchpad, not to analyze its merits or compositional potential.

(142) “The typewriter,” McLuhan writes, “fuses composition and publication, causing an entirely new attitude to the written and printed word” (Understanding Media 228). . . . The ability to produce new knowledge via the mechanics of the typewriter - be it typographic or visual - leads to the kinds of visual knowleddge computing can allow for via its manipulation of programmed language into alternative kinds of representations. . . . The computer display, McLuhan contends, allows writers to become involved in a visual composing process in ways movable type (which is performed elsewhere, and not by the writer) did not allow.

(143-144) The Research in Written Composition claim is that the tool is either not applicable or it must be studied in depth empirically before it can be evaluated for pedagogical usage. Its usage must be controlled for its value to be determined. Meanwhile, generations grow up using these tools daily, generations learn their application without controlled study, and, in turn, generations grow up internalizing new kinds of thought processes (the visual functioning by a different logic than the typographic) that affect communicative practices outside of a given classroom situation. The mass proliferation of Weblogs and related applications reflects this point. . . . What television was for McLuhan - “With TV, the viewer is the screen” - the Weblog or social software variant is partly for current electronic discourse (Understanding Media 272). And this has all occurred without “further study.”

Television

(145) The record cover identifies the gap between 1963 writing instruction and 1963 writing with images.

Blue Note Records

(146) Blue Note's cover designs commutated the symbols of both urban and pop culture into a cool aesthetic.

(147-148) it is that question of selfhood that is most important to writing with images. Blue Notes shapes selfhood; in particular, its images expand temporal interest in equality, African-American identity, and economics.

(149) the pedagogical decision to not teach students how to work with imagery reflects not only an anti-visual ideological position but also a desire to use print in order to de-emphasize the existence of nonconventional or disruptive subject matter along with perceived nonconventional forms of writing (like images).

(150) The Blue Note rhetoric is not a replication of traditional syllogistic argumentation. Its mix of iconic display and juxtaposition propose a more complex construction of ideas.

A Pedagogy of the Image

(151) Today, forty years after Winzeler, it can feel just as futile to push the visual in a field that still obsesses not over printed words as much as it does over print logic. In a typical contemporary classroom, Power Point's slide show of bullet points and static clipart replaces Winzeler's overhead projector because it is the technology that most closely duplicates print logic.

(152) “Write an essay” is the prescriptive. Find the errors in the image you are examining (why the ad does or does not work). Construct your response within the logic of print (the essay).

(152) To compose the Blue Note way, writers assemble iconic imagery into a space like a Web site (though a Photoshop composite, Flash site, or even animated gif would suffice) in order to construct an argument, present a position, express an idea, or perform any other rhetorical act.

The Cool Writer

(153) Liu's mistake, like composition studies' general error in reducing technology to only the tools of technology, is in ignoring a rich rhetorical tradition associated with cool and digital culture that does not depend on personality.

(154) The fault is in the ways the discipline itself - as a whole - images writing and writers. If the classroom writer, like the cliché cool figure, is the only kind of writer we imagine, then our perception of writing will remain narrow in scope.

(154-155) In his textbook Internet Invention, Gregory Ulmer contextualizes the cool writer as a participant in electracy. . . . Cool writing signifies more than sucking or being good; it stands for an electronic rhetoric.

(155) The cool writer encompasses what Burroughs calls a “media being,” an individual who mixes and is mixed, who composes with media by commutating, appropriating, visualizing, and chorally structuring knowledge.

How does Rice's cool writer compare to Heim's cybersage?

(156) And here lies composition studies' greatest dilemma regarding media. Are media a counterinfluence, or are they, in fact, influences? . . . to make the claim for broad influence, we have to expand the types of writing students do so that they better reflect the kinds of writing media generate.

(157) As I have tried to show, one particular moment, 1963, was in fact like no other moment, but what made it unique has gone unnoticed until now. Our task today is to reimagine our status quos, to reconceptualize writing so that it includes, among other things, the notion of cool.

The Question of Programming Languages

Why is C the most popular programming language? Is this a question in the study of texts and technology?

Notes for Manovich The Language of New Media

Notes for Lev Manovich The Language of New Media

(74) Text is unique among media types. It plays a privileged role in computer culture. On the one hand, it is one media type among others. But, on the other hand, it is a metalanguage of computer media, a code in which all other media are represented.

Now that we are getting away from logocentrism, this kind of consideration is possible.

(74) If computers use text as their metalanguage, cultural interfaces in their turn inherit the principles of text organization developed by human civilization throughout its existence. One of these principles is a page - a rectangular surface containing a limited amount of information, designed to be accessed in some order, and having a particular relationship to other pages.

This implies the linearity or sequentiality or simply the logic and rules by which the computer operates, the famous “fetch and execute” concept from early computer scientists like von Neumann and Turing.

(158) By establishing a logic that controls the changes and the correlation on values on these dimensions, digital filmmakers can create what I will call spatial montage.

(159) Compositing, achieve in Tango through optical printing, allows the filmmaker to superimpose a number of elements, or whole words, within a single space. . . . Works such as Tango and Steps develop what I will call an ontological montage: the coexistence of ontologically incompatible elements within the same time and space.

(159) While previously, filmmakers usually worked with a single format throughout the whole film, the accelerated replacement of different analog and digital formats since the 1970s made the coexistence of stylistically diverse elements a norm rather than the exception for new media objects. Compositing can be used to hide this diversity - or it can be used to foreground it, creating it artificially if necessary. For instance, the film Forest Gump emphasizes stylistic differences between various shots; this simulation of different film and video artifacts is an important aspect of its narrative system.

Just when you thought it could not get any deeper, style comes after ontology. Manovich runs his theory through “montage” like an operator in a computer program that is itself supposed to be a metaphor for how the human lifeworld works.

(160) the shots in his films that combine live-action footage with graphic elements position all elements on parallel planes; the elements move parallel to the screen. . . . this subordination of live action to animation is the logic of digital cinema in general.

Style controls (informs) ontology; subordination of live action is representation's hegemony (and hysteresis).

Representation versus Communication

(161) Still, no new media objects are being generated when the user follows a hyperlink to another Web site, or uses telepresence to observe or act in a remote location, or communicates in real time with other users using Internet chat, or just makes a plain old-fashioned telephone call. In short, once we begin dealing with verbs and nouns which begin with tele-, we are no longer dealing with the traditional cultural domain of representation. Instead, we enter a new conceptual space, which this book has not explored so far - telecommunication.

This is what I mean by Manovich delaying discussion of what he calls 'telecommunication'. Importance of no new media objects (sic) are being generated divides the book in half at page 161 by instantiating tele-operator conceived as a computer program running a real time communications system, from TCP/IP to POTS.

(162) Clearly, we are more impressed (or at least, we were until the arrival of the Internet) with modern media's ability to record aspects of reality and then use these recordings to simulate it for our senses than with its real-time communication aspect. . . . the new recording technologies led to the development of new arts in a way that real-time communication did not.

Link with history of writing. Recording over RTC (real time communication, real time control) as technologies noticed and manipulated/controlled artistically controlled/manipulated (representation over RTC).

(162-163) modern media technologies have developed along two distinct trajectories. The first is representational technologies . . . second is real-time communication technologies. . . . Such new twentieth-century cultural forms as radio and, later, television emerge at the intersection of these two trajectories. . . . the majority of programming came to be prerecorded.

Imagine real time generation of TV signal dynamically: this is the norm for the Internet. We should seek to understand the Internet, then, for which purpose I argue we should learn to comprehend the likes of Transmission Control Protocol, Internet Protocol, and even Ethernet to a degree. I do not think that Landow appreciates this distinction.

(163) The concept of an aesthetic object is an object, that is, a self-contained structure limited in space and/or time, is fundamental to all modern thinking about aesthetics. . . . Nelson Goodman . . . characteristics assume a finite object in space and/or time - a literary text, a musical or dance performance, a painting, a work of architecture. . . . “From Work to Text” by Roland Barthes . . . notion of a “text” still assumes a reader “reading,” in the most general sense, something previously “written.” In short, while a “text” is interactive, hypertextual, distributed, and dynamic (to translate Barthes's propositions into new media terms), it is still a finite object.

(163-164) By foregrounding telecommunication, both real-time and asynchronous, as a fundamental cultural activity, the Internet asks us to reconsider the very paradigm of an aesthetic object. Is it necessary for the concept of the aesthetic to assume representation? Does are [sic] necessary involve a finite object? . . . if a user accessing information and a user telecommunicating with other(s) are a common in computer culture as a user interacting with a representation, can we expand our aesthetic theories to include these two new situations?

Telepresence: Illusion versus Action

(165) the ability to “teleport” instantly from one server to another, to be able to explore a multitude of documents located on computers around the world, all from one location, is much more important [sic] that being able to perform physical actions in one remote location.

Do we forgive Manovich for these editing mistakes to miss his final proof reading? Or is this the easily found slippage of his thought, on the same axis/pole of Landow missing the foregrounding of TCP/IP more than Ethernet. This carelessness cheapens and causes one to shy away from actually learning how they work. Imagine telepresence of a pinball machine using history of games played on actual playfields (by serial number) to simulate play for the tele-operator (strike out, not through, to ensure the specificity of hyphen is not lost - similar to Rousseau's concern for the cheapening of spoken language by articulation to simplify writing for lack of recording devices). Manovich gives an example of what I am proposing on page 170.

(165) telepresence can be thought of as one example of representational technologies used to enable action, that is, to allow the viewer to manipulate reality through representations. Other examples of these action-enabling technologies are maps, architectural drawings, and x-rays.

These are poor examples to compare to telepresence, which includes a dynamic, computational component that affords telecommunication via TCP/IPv4 inter networked von Neumann stored program concept fetch execute sequential processing electronic computing machinery.

(166) Popular media has downplayed the concept of telepresence in favor of virtual reality.

(166) Telepresence allows the subject to control not just the simulation but reality itself.

(167) A better term would be teleaction. Acting over distance. In real time.

Although the case of the remote controlled pinball machine may be indistinguishable from a virtual reality simulation of a pinball machine. Teleaction: how long is the lever? At what point does the lever become an image-instrument?

Image-Instruments

(167) French philosopher and sociologist Bruno Latour proposes that certain kinds of images have always functioned as instruments of control and power, power being defined as the ability to mobilize and manipulate resources across space and time.

(168) perspective is more than just a sign system that reflects reality - it makes possible the manipulation of reality through the manipulation of its signs.

Telecommunication

(169) The ability to receive visual information about a remote place in real time allows us to manipulate physical reality in this place, also in real-time.

(170) different kinds of teleaction require different temporal and spatial resolutions.

(170) the technology that makes teleaction in real time possible is electronic telecommunication. . . . Coupled with a computer used for real-time control, electronic telecommunication leads to a new and unprecedented relationship between objects and their signs. It makes instantaneous not only the process by which objects are turned into signs but also the reverse process - the manipulation of objects through these signs.

(170) A sign is something which can be used to teleact.

New: instantaneous representation and control. Imagine those required for playing a pinball machine from the late 1970s to early 1980s, the first generation of digital electronic computer controlled pinball machines.

Distance and Aura

(173) The regime of Big Optics inevitably leads to real-time politics, a politics that requires instant reactions to events transmitted with the speed of light, and that, ultimately, can only be efficiently handled by computers responding to each other.

(173) Virilio postulates a historical break between film and telecommunication, between Small Optics and Big Optics.

There is always a delay and there are always constraints. It is much easier to enumerate and talk about those affecting computer to computer communication than any including non-'computer' participants.

(175) In Western thought, vision has always been understood and discussed in opposition to touch, so, inevitably, the denigration of vision (to use Martin Jay's term) leads to the elevation of touch. Thus criticism of vision predictably leads to a new theoretical interest in the idea of the haptic.

(175) The potential aggressiveness of looking turns out to be rather more innocent than the actual aggression of electronically enabled touch.

Notes on Landow Hypertext 3.0

Notes for George P. Landow Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization

Chapter 1

AN INTRODUCTION

(15) The anchor feature in HTML, which is created by the tag, thus permits authors to link to a specific section of long document.

This mistake in an otherwise educational lexia could be the starting point of a psycho-analysis, but we have chosen to focus on the non-human actants in the network. Is technical education infused (spliced) or woven humanities discourse? Of the eight or nine types of hyperlinks Landow enumerates,

(18) Typed links, our ninth category, take the form of limiting an electronic link to a specific kind of relationship.

These are the closest to the 'phasor' type of hyperlink I have been imagining both in computer software development and philosophical relevance. Could tie in Engelbart's hyperscope, whom Landow mentions, to explain this point.

(52) Electronic linking shifts the boundaries between one text and another as well as between the author and the reader and between the teacher and the student. It also has radical effects on our experience of author, text, and work, redefining each. Its effects are so basic, so radical, that it reveals that many of our most cherished, most commonplace, ideas and attitudes toward literature and literary production turn out to be the result of that particular form of information technology and technology of cultural memory that has provided the setting for them. This technology - that of the printed book and its close relations, which include the typed or printed page - engenders certain notions of authorial property, authorial uniqueness, and a physically isolated text that hypertext makes untenable. The evidence of hypertext, in other words, historicizes many of our most commonplace assumptions, thereby forcing them to descend from the ethereality of abstraction and appear as corollary to a particular technology rooted in specific times and places. In making available these points, hypertext has much in common with some major points of contemporary literary and semiological theory, particularly with Derrida's emphasis on decentering and with Barthe's conception of the readerly versus the writerly text.

What about throwing into question the asymmetry between human and non-human parts of the phenomenon? The determinism to which Landow alludes can be interpreted as challenging even the anthropocentric bias that remains after Derrida released us from logocentrism.

()

The Poller Project

The Poller Project http://sourceforge.net/projects/poller/

This project is intended to be a single PHP script capable of administering a simple, browser based, multiple question, multiple choice poll for small audiences such as during a presentation or lecture served directly from the presenter's computer. It is driven by MySQL database tables that contain the poll questions, and into which the responses are recorded. Two browser windows are used on the controlling computer: one that is set to “display” on the projector screen, which refreshes once every second to control the poll (if it is set in automatic mode), and one set to “console” which the presenter or associate uses to start the poll, and advance the questions if it is not in automatic mode.

The presenter establishes a local, wireless network and seeds the PollInfo table with the IP address of the controlling computer. Members of the audience connect to the that IP address using their laptops and mobile browsing devices. When a “question” is asked, they are able to respond by selecting one of the responses that will display on their screens as well as the main projection screen.

The current version (0.3.0) allows for displaying different lexia depending on the statistical mode of the responses to the previous question, allowing the presenter to adjust the flow of the presentation based on anonymous feedback from the audience. Since the software is free, open source distributed under the GPL, it can be modified and extended to perform other functions. Here are some facts about the sample data included in this package: the name of the Poll is FOSS, the controlling webserver IP address is 192.168.0.10; from the first question to completion, the poll runs for approximately five minutes, which is 300 seconds; there are n discrete questions, a few of which accept responses from the network interactors via HTTP to the PHP program poller.php; only two did, for a total of approximately ten responses; out of approximately twelve humans; four different Ogg Vorbis codec digital audio files are played during the course of the poll.

After the poll is complete, running the old CGI script (poller.cgi) yields the results:

Results for Question 13: These FOUR FREEDOMS are guaranteed by

A) Creative Commons 0 responses

B) DMCA 0 responses

C) GPLv2 1 responses

D) Linux 0 responses

E) Microsoft Shared Source 0 responses

Results for Question 15: So what is Linux?

A) Finnish detergent 0 responses

B) Monolithic kernel 0 responses

C) Shareware operating system 0 responses

D) Unix-like suite of system programs 0 responses

E) Free, open source operating system 3 responses

Results for Question 43: The Storyspace software Michael Joyce used to create Twelve Blue is

A) Discontinued 0 responses

B) FOSS 1 responses

C) $295 0 responses

D) Shareware 0 responses

Results for Question 74: Are these oven controls designed well?

A) YES 1 responses

B) NO 0 responses

C) Did not read Norman 0 responses

When I used the “What is Linux” question in a presentation with about 50 attendees of the 2007 Computing and Philosophy conference, the responses were mixed. The participants in the Introduction to Texts and Technology seminar all chose “Free, open source operating system,” so it was appropriate to present the GNU material. A future version of the program could skip or condense the GNU segment if the statistical mode of the responses to the question had been correct response.

Please visit the project web site on Sourceforge (http://poller.sourceforge.net/) for more information, including how to download the source code. Included in the 0.3.0 release are the SQL statements used to create the questions for the “FOSS” presentation, and a full dump of the database in order to recreate the state of the webserver at the end of the presentation.

Giant Underwater Books

I literally drew this on the table cloth tonight as I was trying to come up with some kind of experimental book that was, for a change, not related to computer technology or free, open source software.

It is a giant underwater ribbon of recycled garbage arranged to be read by divers over many years using flashlights that project three dimensionally on the surrounding particles suspended in the water (BS&W is the technical term from petroleum engineering, not sure what the oceanographic term is even though I had an oceanography course in college). You can read what is woven and otherwise inscribed onto the fabric of the huge text itself, or view the image shimmering around you.

• This book is like a Moebius strip or a continuous sheet like the old cloth towels wound like typewriter ribbon you used to find in restrooms to dry your hands. Floating, suspended in the water both sides are legible.Out of habit I divided it into a sequence of pages, like large computer display screens or an infinite Escher-like Turing Machine tape. Consider the clustering concept that Michael Heim describes in Electric Language: a four foot by five foot paper sheet that is beyond the scale of any imaginable computer display in the 1980s - the 'pages' of this book are larger still. That is why one of the divers exclaims, It's going to take me 10 years to read this!

• Reading tied to swimming underwater instead of playing dead on dry land. At first it seems very unnatural, but once staying still to read seemed odd. DL quote, noting that in BofB no non-sedentary reading methods are described. Doesn't Ulmer play on this idea with his Dreadmill?
  

• Blocks out sound and other visual distractions. The aural effect of submersion reflects on Ong's distinction between the all aboutness of sound for speaking versus the singular locus of vision for reading.

• Just as the Kindle is being promoted as a 'green' environmentally sound reading device, this huge underwater ribbon will be woven from garbage floating in the oceans today, by robots or specially trained sea creatures. Over many decades as the books are slowly 'written', trash will turn into treasure. It is the reversal of the destruction of nature by the side effects of literacy, if you are like Ong and credit the rise of modern science and industry to literacy and print. Crap, technology creeps in..
  

ENG_6801 Draft for Module 3

Reading Electronic Literature

Part I. Introduction: All Hail Electronic Literature!

The weakness of any survey of electronic literature published as a printed book is how quickly it becomes obsolete. So may become the case with N. Katherine Hayles' thoroughly researched and remarkably comprehensive Electronic Literature, which bearing the publication date of 2008 at least the carries the mark of the current year. The purpose of its first chapter - Electronic Literature: What is it? - is to define electronic literature (henceforth EL), survey its genres, expand on its differences with print literature, both in terms of composition and criticism, and provide some ideas on its preservation and dissemination, again emphasizing new challenges and opportunities provided by this medium. This introduction sets the stage for the remainder of the book. What EL is not, is the mere digitization of print literature; there must be important aspects of the work that make it “a first-generation digital object created on a computer and (usually) meant to be read on a computer“ (3). She gives some ground by including in the scope of “the literary” “creative artworks that interrogate the histories, contexts, and productions of literature, including as well the verbal art of literature proper” (4). On this reading, EL may include digitizations of originally print literature, such as ancient Greek texts or the Star Wars screenplay, provided there is a creative element to them that is natively digital.

She offers a broad survey of genres of EL, beginning with familiar “first-generation” hypertext-oriented works that everyone knows such as Michael Joyce's afternoon: a story, Stuart Moulthrop's Victory Garden, and Shelly Jackson's Patchwork Girl, many of which were created my proprietary software such as Storyspace (6). Both the nature of their composition - blocks of text (lexia) energized primarily by hyperlinks - and their means of production have been eclipsed by new works leveraging a panoply of multimedia components and navigational mechanisms, as well as delivery over the Web via standard browser-based technologies instead of proprietary, stand-alone solutions. Her survey includes many recent examples of EL in genres including “[h]ypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive fiction, locative narratives, installation pieces, 'codework', generative art, and the Flash poem” (30).

New modes of analysis and criticism have arisen along with the new forms. For example, it is worthwhile to examine the similarities and differences between EL and computer games; in both, the user is required to invest substantial effort to engage in the computational mechanisms, but for different purposes: “[p]araphrasing Markku Eskelinen's elegant formulation, we may say that with games the user interprets in order to configure, wheres in works whose primary interest is narrative, the user configures in order to interpret” (8). In many cases it is appropriate to describe EL as instruments that users can learn to play in order to fully appreciate their nuances. Furthermore, the program source code and operating environment supporting EL must be accounted in their analysis, since, as Hayles quotes Alexander Galloway, “Code is the only language that is executable” (35). Widening the scope to include code and operating environments reflects the fact that EL engages many skills beyond literary composition, and point made many times by Drucker and McVarish in Graphic Design History, which Hayles refers to as “a site for negotiations between diverse constituencies and different kinds of expertise”(38). Indeed, the appreciation of the collaborative design and production processes of most complex works of EL contacts the discipline with wider social practices, such as “the development of commercial software, the competing philosophies of open source freeware and shareware, the economics and geopolitical terrain of the internet and World Wide Web, and a host of other factors that directly influence how electronic literature is created and stored, sold or given away, preserved or allowed to decline into obsolescence” (39).

Critical engagement with the social practices surrounding EL foreground the importance of the means by which works are disseminated and preserved, not merely because electronic formats have historically enjoyed much shorter lifespans than printed books, which last for centuries rather than decades, but also because electronic formats involve a host of design decisions that are intimately tied to the early stages of their creation, not merely the publication of the finished product. Thus recommendations are offered concerning the choice of open versus closed systems, community direction versus corporate, plain-text versus binary data formats, and so on. In the sections that follow, three major themes - intermediation, the historical context of EL, and computational practice - will be explored using the examples Halyes provides. In the concluding section, a summary table orienting these works upon a number of dimensions will be presented, including these social and technological concerns that are not necessarily unique to EL but whose implications are clearly significant for its creators and consumers.

Part II. Intermediation: Interpreting Electronic Literature

In the second chapter of Electronic Literature, Hayles develops the concept of intermediation as a way to examine electronic texts without binding them to the traditional modes of interpretation that have been used for critical study of print literature. The mark of digital born works is the non-trivial role played by nonhuman, technological components in not only the preparation of the work, but its dynamic rendering to readers, viewers, listeners - many prefer the term 'interactors', since many senses may be elicited at once in activities that go beyond passive consumption - and how it abides and potentially mutates within information systems. Departing from the traditional model in which “it's all in the head of the reader,” meaning develops through the interaction of human and machine in ways that are often emergent, associative, layered, and adaptive through various levels iteratively feeding back into each other. Through process of intermediation, a term Hayles adapts from Nicholas Gessler, as it is often employed in the context of computer software simulating artificial life,

whereby a first-level emergent pattern is captured in another medium and re-represented with the primitives of the new medium, which leads to an emergent result captured in turn by yet another medium, and so forth. The result is what researchers in artificial life call a “dynamic hierarchy,” a multi-tiered system in which feedback and feedforward loops tie the system together through continuing interactions circulating throughout the hierarchy (45).

Such systems typically employ multiple, intermediating levels of processes that may be digital, analog, or a combination of both, so that their overall effect resembles a self-emerging, living system. Hayles' maneuver is to “make a speculative leap and consider the human and the digital computer as partners in a dynamic heterarchy bound together by intermediating dynamics” (47). To support her position, she invokes computational models of consciousness that counter the Cartesian model of an irreducible rationality by theorists including Douglas Hofstadter, Daniel C. Dennett, and Edward Fredkin. Hofstadter emphasizes the importance of pattern recognition and extrapolation from analogy as playing roles as important as literal, logical deduction in rounding out models of cognition. Dennett uses thought experiments to demonstrate how human intentionality may emerge as an artifact from subcognitive processes. Fredkin contributes the concept of “aboutness,” to align the meaning of information with the process that interprets it, whether it is a music player generating sound from digital files or a human appreciating the details of the musical work reproduced (52-53).

Taking something of a leap, Hayles joins these theories together to posit intermediation as a symbiosis of human and computer, with each partaking in the layered processing of emergent, high-level responses from lower-level operations in both the reading and writing of EL, making the claim that cognition occurs in both. “The result is a meta-analogy: as human cognition is to the creation and consumption of the work, so computer cognition is to its execution and performance” (57). How meaning evolves through the interplay between human and nonhuman cognition will be examined in three works: Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, The Jew's Daughter by Jud Morissey, and Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs by Marcia Mencia.

Intermediation explains that cognition arising from iterative associations occurs in both human and nonhuman systems. The uninformed reader will bounce around the space of possible hyperlinks and absorb, through repetition, what we might otherwise explain through associations. Jill Walker, in her interpretation of Joyce's earlier Storyspace output afternoon, relays J. Hills Miller's 'Nietzschean repetition' in “[r]e-reading nodes in new surroundings is a form of repetition typical of hypertext. Often, re-reading a node invests it with new meaning.” The work is a series of lexia, generally a page or less, some containing hyperlinks, or images, which are also hyperlinks. The oft-repeat quote from William Gass describes this gentle type of intermediation - many of the other works to be reviewed forcefully jar the interactor from one component of the text to another - "So a random set of meanings has softly gathered around the word the way lint collects. The mind does that."

Users interact with Twelve Blue via generic HTML browser parsing 208 text, image, and image map source files; the only session information that is intentionally part of literary work as planned by the author is the effect visiting links has on making parts of certain files disappear from the client display because the link visited color is identical to the background blue color. Here is how it works:

Two HTML frames separate the view into a navigation area on the far left of 85 columns, and a viewing area on the right that is the rest of the screen. In the starting page (Twelve_Blue.html) the two frames contain 'subtexts' (identified via SRC tags) titlepage.html and twelvepic.html, respectively, that are displayed, and offer the initial user interface of navigation choices. The left (title) frame offers a single hyperlink called “BEGIN” that points to sl1.html. The main frame contains a large image of twelve colored 'threads' (twelvepic1.gif), eight hyperlinks for the “BARS” referred to in the title frame, and the quote from William Gass. Each of the numbered “BARS” 1-8 below the image point to sl1.html, sl2.html, etc. The image itself is defined with a map of hyperlinks so that various rectangular regions of the image point to the same eight destinations as the “BARS”. For example, the region spanning the Cartesian grid beginning at the upper left-hand point 3 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 42 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis links to sl1.html. The region beginning at point 43 on the x-axis and 2 on the y-axis to 85 on the x-axis and 227 on the y-axis (coords="43,3,85,227") links to sl2.html, and so on. This means that while a horizontal sequence is established, the threads themselves are indistinct. Subsequent pages will allow offer different destinations depending on the thread. Using the available navigation links, therefore, the user has seventeen entry points into the work, although there are only eight different destinations. This mobility invites playing the work like a musical instrument, rather than passively reading pages.

The literary technique of flash-forward and flash-back includes post-mortem awareness resembling conscious reflection; the narratives of the drowning deaf boy and Ed Stanko continue into a dreamy state as they die. Moreover, there is no clear ending to the work, although the disappearing links do provide a sense of temporality. Hayles describes this break from the traditional plot as “one in which life and death exist on a continuum with flowing and indeterminate boundaries” (69). The overall effect is coming to know the story from multiple perspectives, from different characters at different points in time, piecemeal, so that eventually through associations the intertwined bars come together, collecting like lint or snowflakes.

Interacting with Twelve Blue retains much of the control enjoyed by readers of printed pages, whereas Jud Morissey's Mac or Windows binary executable The Jew's Daughter (TJD.exe) subverts the interactor's control. At one point it reads, “The broken sum of its parts is a great agonist.” The entire work is 22 lines of black text on a white background with blue text that behaves like a mouse-over hyperlink, instantly changing some of the text, forcing you to re-read and try to remember what you just read, slowly building the narrative in a more broken manner than Twelve Blue's clean transitions. You learn to read it after a few mouse-overs of the blue text, when “It is an ultimatum, one that” ends the page and continues at the top. The text pretends to be intelligent. Some thoughts finish before they are started. At one point the letters appear one by one; “In Java she had seen a woman decapitated.” Like Twelve Blue, this counts as literature because it tells a story. At some points new words appear one by one. Hayles views the work as a very rich but complicated reinterpretation of consciousness as an epiphenomenon in which there is no self, only an illusion of one. The focalized reader consciousness gets fragmented into strong memories of persistent text on the 22 lines and into weak memories from associations. It can be the reverse mirror image of the unintelligent machine fomenting consciousness as the closed-loop feedback, dynamically self-reprogrammable control system symbiosis with humans known as cyberspace, the internet, the WWW, and so on. Like Twelve Blue, it takes a while reading the disjointed pages before the story coalesces, although this experience is no different than reading the first hundred pages of a very long novel before grasping the story lines and identity of the various characters. “Are you going to risk the night?” seems to begin a dream sequence. The whole work now seems like a dream, the piecing together that is a dream to the semi-conscious dreamer, then trying to remember the pieces while awakening. By focusing on a word, mousing over the blue words, like the semi-conscious dreamer trying too hard to focus on something in the dream, the scene is distorted as more connections are made with the other world.

“And now for something completely different,” as the Monty Python meta-narrator used to say. At the far pole of intermediation is the destruction of narrative into the experimental, such as the investigation of basic aural and visual phenomena in Marcia Mencia's Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs. Moreover, like TJD.exe, this work is delivered as binary data in Macromedia Flash format, offering no plain-text, prima facie clues to the underlying source code. skymove.swf plays via Flash plugin for a generic browser such as Mozilla Firefox. Clouds drift by horizontally, and at the bottom of the screen are 13 numbered sets of buttons using the common symbols for PLAY and STOP. Each button seems to run a program displaying a bird-like silhouette, and letters, and accompanying sound is produced from a generic audio subsystem. The letters are sometimes the edge of the bird's outline, inside it, pushed in front of it, and so on. Activating the first bird brings forth a silhouette of a bird flying left to right across the screen whose outline is composed of the letters of its song, which is heard on the computer speakers. The second button elicits the formation of a large, single bird image from dispersed symbols that immediately flies off the screen once assembled. By the sixth button, the characters of this large, single, immobile bird are much more difficult to discern, moving around overlapping each other within the confines of the bird's silhouette. Rather than spelling out the song, one letter at a time shifts into visibility and then back into obscurity. In the seventh, the letters circulate around the form like a serpentine belt, with no spaces in between to suggest distinct words. The twelfth button invokes a single large, white semi-transparent silhouette whose song emerges one letter at a time coming forward overlaying the other letters, “see see” and then there are too many letters piled up to make sense of it. Activating all the birds at once - the first thing a child would be likely to do - creates a cacophony that eventually regulates itself. The author describes the works as an exploration of “kinetic typography, the animation of images and sound.” She noted similarities between the phonemes of the transcript of birds' songs in The Thinking Ear and phonemes used in her other works. So these are translations of birds songs into written human language, interpreted back into human voice. Hayles interprets this work as intermediating the habitual, automatic cognitive decoding of print as subvocalization, for here the vocalized sounds dominate and are only suggested by the display of characters.

Part III. Historical Context

To describe a historical context for EL reflects a particular ontology; Hayles places it within the perspective of Friedrich Kittler's media theory, for which the essence of literature is in its material medium, or media, if multiple, such as visual and aural media, pictures and sounds, and therefore, Hayles argues, “[l]iterature acts on the body but only within the horizon of the medium's technical capabilities” (89). Kittler saw a great technological advance in Heinrich Stephanie's phonetic method of reading, which occurred around 1800 - something most readers of the 2000s do not realize, that there had ever been different ways of reading - “erasing the materiality of the grapheme and substituting instead a subvocalized voice” (89). Other great innovations include the gramophone, film, and typewriter, if this can be intuited from the title of one of his most famous books. Kittler's theory reflects a deterministic approach to the philosophy of technology; it ignores the deep interaction between technical processes and human societies and cultures. Hayles points to multiple critics who argue that Kittler focuses on war as the primary influence determining the course of technological change for media precisely because military exigencies seem to offer the only compelling reason to advance the state of the art. No doubt he would say the same for the Internet, as do most networking textbooks when they trace its origins back to the need of the US military to develop inter networking and electronic communications standards. Yet as Hayles is adamant, “media alone cannot possibly account for all the complex factors that go into creating national military conflicts. .. media transformations alone are not sufficient” (93). Her counterexample describing the combination of technological and cultural conditions that shape the fascinating lifeworld of global currency traders reveals both a media specific component, the different sense of time created by their monitors displaying global, real-time market conditions, and social formations such as male aggression, antagonism, and warfare that are common to the high stakes, rapidly transforming trade floor arena.

The human components, especially physical attributes of human bodies, also play a role. Mark Hansen is a proponent of the position that embodiment - “proprioception, kinesthetic, and haptic capacities” - plays as important a role in experiencing media as the primary senses like vision and hearing, citing research in “virtual reality sickness” (106). Hayles is not satisfied with this reductive stance because, like Kittler's technological determinism, it fails to keep in view the materiality of the human/machine interface: “[i]t is as though the feedback loop between technical object and embodied human enactor has been cut off halfway through: potentiality flows from the object into the deep inner senses of the embodied human, but its flow back into the object has been short-circuited, leading to an impoverished account of the object's agential capacities to act outside the human's mobilization of its stimuli” (109). Hayles claims her own framework “entagles body and machine in open-ended recursivity” so as not to concretize the possibilities of electronic literature in particular technological or anthropological paradigms (130).

An exemplar of an electronic text that is open ended, entangling human and machine in recursive intermediation is Talon Memmott's Lexia to Perplexia, a Javascript enhanced HTML text that works in standard browsers by combining navigation via the webserver responding to hyperlinks executed by the interactor and the 'client side' dynamism offered by Javascript, albeit originally programmed using non-standard extensions only supported by current versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer browser. The author's description notes that “[a]t times its interactive features override the source text, leading to a fragmentary reading experience. .. certain theoretical attributes are not displayed as text but are incorporated into the functionality of the work.” It develops its own terms and is “play between the rigorous and the frivolous.” Hayles write about “[t]he notorious 'nervousness' of this work, whereby a tiny twitch of the cursor can cause events to happen that the user did not intend and cannot completely control, conveys through its opaque functionality intuitions about dispersed subjectivities and screens with agential powers similar to those we saw with international currency traders” (120). Like Twelve Blue and many lexia-based EL, following the default entry into the work offers the interactor with a small number of selections akin to chapter headings. Once entered, navigation within one of the headings (“The Process of Attachment, “Double-Funnels,” “Metastrophe,” and “Exe.Termination”) is suggestive, experimental, often surprising, through the combination of traditional mouse click hyperlinks and Javascript code that activates features by mere mouse over. By “taking fingersteps into the apparatus” the materiality of the text is highlighted, although really mouse gestures moreso than keyboarding. Images, diagrams, moving lines and pointers, as well as large and small blocks of text compete for the interactor's attention, often obscuring one another. This work is not narrative in the sense of Twelve Blue or The Jew's Daughter; it is more a quasi-academic exegesis of the four movements from “The Process of Attachment” to “Exe.Termination” that illustrates Hayle's interpretive framework.

The first part, “The Process of Attachment” seems to depict the human eye attaching itself to the nonhuman, machinic system, not as a proxy of the self but transformed, mediated: “It is never I that enters. .. The screen-bound avatar is a micromental reproduction of the trans|missive hero-agent. .. Though the delivery-machine feels no-thing, the mediation, all co-operation between the I and the apparatus is con.sensual.” Memmott's neologisms can be exasperating to the detail-oriented interactor, never sure when their temporary meanings will transform into something different, or whether their 'codework' genuinely reflects the design of the underlying source code or merely suggestive of imaginary operations. When the possibilities of this part seem to have been played out, the interactor must return to the “main menu” by clicking the ever-present “LEXIA to PERPLEXIA” in the upper left-hand corner.

Once attached to the system, intermediation occurs through a model of “Double Funnels,” the second main heading, symbolized by these expressions:

[local.{[*...(*] | )}(...^...){( | [*)...*]}.remote]

(s)T(ex)(T)(s)

The code-work attempts to encode a mechanisms for uniting local and remote (s)'s (eye icons). A way for the “analog and slippery digits of the real” to exit to the remote, distant other as if poured into the funnel. The screen briefly displays, in very large characters, EXIT, and below, (s)T(ex)T(s), in which texts unmistakenly appears although it is better understand as another representation of the code-work below it. Mousing around and clicking suggestive hyperlinks again produces a collage of images, diagrams, and lexia, all the while maintaining the auspices of an academic presentation. A lengthy commentary upon the communication process, 'exe.change', reminiscent of Shannon's theory, notes that because it is shared conduit, “[b]etween the local and the remote, the success and failure of communification in the middle, the mess in the middle is prone to various mechanoid intensities borne from the simultaneous passage of others through the general conduit.”

The third part, “Metashtrophe,” begins with “Minifestos,” complete with timestamps (in the future 2000), mouse-overs producing secondary pop ups giving definitions of certain words or adding more figures to the background diagram. The final part, “Exe.Termination,” presents two columns with a large white word changing to form different combinations, the lefthand side like minutes, the righthand side like hours, and the center large grey symbols like seconds. Images that look like pages of printed text, when mouse over, add a diagram or explanatory lexia for a few seconds. Some of the images resemble rough blackboard sketches of the design of L2P itself. (Following “TALAN MEMMOTT” from the main page to the “ABOUT” offers another glimpse into the behind-the-scenes perspective of the work, including a photographed image of a pile of books for the bibliography.)

Part IV. Computational Practice

When referring to computational practice, Hayles means the active role of “technological nonconscious” embodied in modern electronic computing systems, as opposed to the affordances provided by print technologies. Computational practice intermediate the experience of EL, in particular two ways: “verbal narratives are simultaneously conveyed and disrupted by code” and “distributed cognition implies distributed agency” (136). It is important to believe that knowledge can be transmitted through social practices and enactments, such as craft making, dance, and other demonstrative activities without consciously verbalizing it. Otherwise, it is hard to understand the epistemological function of most mixed media. Contemporary computational practices erode the privileged role of the coherent, well-formed lexia while offloading more and more cognition and agency from human to nonhuman mechanisms. The result is that “[e]lectronic literature can tap into highly charged differentials that are unusually heterogeneous, due in part to uneven developments of computational media and in part to unevenly distributed experiences among users” (138). This effect is a result of the combination of the 'ergodic' nature intrinsic to of much EL, inexperience with the new stylistic conventions that have been surveyed here, as well as the non-trivial art of literary interpretation that may not be shared by those who are highly skilled in the other areas. Thus the experience of EL will vary greatly from interactor to interactor, depending on their particular computing environments, their ability to use them, their experience with formal theories of print literature, and also their ability to peer into the creator's world if they choose to “hack” the work. While Hayles does not investigate this potential, it is certainly one of those “highly charged” zones that interest the technically savvy who want to know “how it works” or wish to rework or build off of the underlying programmatic aspects.

When it is impossible to peer into the inner workings of a literary work with a high degree of computational complexity, it is nonetheless possible to intuit the underlying algorithms. John Cayley's work is a prime example. In Translation, three blocks of symbols are in constant motion to the with the accompaniment of a soundtrack. In a computational procedure he calls “transliteral morphing,” a source text in one language is slowly translated into a target text in another language, letter-by-letter. Hayles explains:

Cayley conjectures that underlying these “higher-level” relationships are lower-level similarities that work not on the level of words, phrases, and sentences but individual phonemes and morphemes. .. Just as Mencia invokes the philological history of language as it moves from orality to writing to digital representation, so Cayley's transliteral morphs are underlain by an algorithm that reflects their phonemic and morpemic relations to one another. (146)

Like Mencia's Birds, visual language is disconnected from subvocalization and rendered letter by letter. However, Cayley's theory is that microstructures bind translations between different human language, and also within machines. His selection of Walter Benjamin's “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man” positions this new possibility against a theological interpretation going back to Berkeley that it is God that ensures the possibility of translation from one language to another. Of course, viewing Translation renders the appearance of a complex, underlying algorithm, but it could be a trick. Something presented in a movie format offers little access to the means of production in a much more profound way than any plain-text format. While it was possible to delve into the inner workings of the hypertext works like Twelve Blue and Lexia to Perplexia, it is not part of the design for the interactor to actually see the source code of the translation algorithm. Moreover, this and all works encoded in Apple Quicktime format are difficult to view on generic x86 GNU/Linux systems. Choice of a commercial, proprietary, patented or copyrighted encoding format is a gamble that future interactors will incur the cost to compute it.

Brian K. Stefans work Star Wars, One Letter At A Time presents the entire printed screenplay of the 1977 movie Star Wars as typed one page at a time on an electric typewriter one key at a key at an average rate of about 10 characters per second. 10 Hertz is about the human limit of 'intelligibility' for discrete sound units as distinguished from very low frequency bass sounds. For each typed letter is the same sound; the space bar and carriage return keys have distinct sounds including a bell. The temptation is great to play the audio soundtrack along with it. There are two files, an HTML file starwars_one_letter.html that invokes the other one, starwars_one_letter.swf. Shockwave Flash movies play readily on generic x86 architecture GNU/Linux browsers with the appropriate Flash plugin. Running Ubuntu Linux 8.04 this was much more “working off the shelf” than the fussy-to-configure WINE software required to view the Apple Quicktime work Translation. A feature of this work is that it can be viewed in a very small window since only one character is ever displayed at a time. Like its two counterparts in Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs, there is nothing else to see on the screen but the rapid changes of this small field. It is difficult for an unfamiliar reader to make sense of it without access to a more familiar page version. The movie Star Wars captivated a generation, and combining replay of the original soundtrack, or even playing the movie itself, with executing starwars_one_letter.swf will be experienced differently by different age and social groups, attesting to an example in which there are few deep program secrets to learn about the work, as opposed to exploring the depths of the source code of Twelve Blue and Lexia to Perplexia.

Before digital computer screens, the tachistoscope was a high speed slide projector that could flash images at 'subliminal rates' in experiments that demonstrated that viewers picked up subconscious cues such as “buy popcorn” when suggestive text and images were delivered via the tachistoscope. William Poundstone notes in the one of the links encircling the START button on Project for Tachistoscope: Bottomless Pit that

The tachistoscope used in early perceptual experiments were slide projectors capable of flashing images as brief as 1 millisecond. This speed was overkill. No matter how brief the image, the retina's afterimage persists for c. 50 milliseconds .. The briefest full-screen image on a 75 Hz CRT lasts 13 milliseconds. .. A given phosphor, or a group of them forming a small image, remains illuminated for about 4 milliseconds. LCD monitors do not scan, but their pixels have a mechanical afterimage of up to 25 milliseconds. .. This site will run on an LCD monitor, but more of the flashed images are likely to be perceptible.

Ironically, most CRT monitors have been retired in favor of energy and space saving LCD units. If starwars_one_letter.swf modulated the 10 Hertz range of aural and visual human perception, William Poundstone's Tachistoscope.swf therefore modulates the up to the 20 Hertz range of visual perception while playing music modulating a much broader aural spectrum than the digital tones of Stephan's work using the same runtime environment (generic x86 architecture GNU/Linux browsers with the appropriate Flash plugin and audio subsystem).

The work presents one word at a time at a quick rate, in the center of the screen, with a pulsating, colorful background and a set of repeating images vaguely related to the story or the current word. Occasionally a second word or additional images or pictures will flash by in very rapid succession, bordering on the subliminal. Meanwhile a minimalist, hypnotic musical accompaniment plays reminiscent of Phillip Glass composition. It takes a number of viewings to grasp the overall narrative, which is about a large pit, bottomless pit that has opened near the town Carbondale during road construction activities. The fictional narrative is often injected with subliminal words such as “Heidelberg”, “Chinatown”, “Chomsky”, “Kuwait” and sometimes what may be complete sentences but are impossible to discern because the only control operation is to EXIT and start the work over. Rather than interpreting itself like Lexia to Perplexia, the outer band of the START screen provides seven lexia that explain the tachistoscope principle, the historic controversy surrounding subliminal messages, system requirements for viewing, and the concept of “semantic priming” that is the key feature of the work.

Summary Table for Reading Electronic Literature

Text	Year	Author	Source Media	Run-time Requirements	Why it's Literature
Twelve Blue	1996	Michael Joyce	HTML	Generic browser	narrative
The Jew's Daughter	2000	Jud Morissey	unknown	Windows binary executable	narrative
Birds Singing Other Birds' Songs	2001	Maria Mencia	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Shockwave Flash plug-in Audio subsystem	interpretive art
Lexia to Perplexia	2000	Talon Memmott	HTML Javascript IE extensions	Internet Explorer browser	philosophical essay narrative
Translation	2004	John Cayley	Quicktime movie	Apple Quicktime Player	theoretical demonstration
Star Wars, One Letter At a Time	2005	Brian K. Stefans	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Audio subsystem	interpretive art
Project for Tachistoscope	2005	William Poundstone	Shockwave Flash	Generic browser Shockwave Flash plug-in Audio subsystem	narrative

These contemporary examples illustrate the electronic computer playing a much more engaged and dynamic role that the hypertext viewer characteristic of EL the 1990s. To Hayles, the unique possibilities the computational practices bring to literary creation invite a revaluation: the technoculture should no longer be seen as an unimaginative outsider, providing merely an updated support mechanism or prop to the codex book, but instead an integral component of creative endeavor, “a performance that addresses us with the full complexity our human natures require, including the rationality of the conscious mind, the embodied response that joins cognition and emotions, and the technological nonconscious that operates through sedimented routines of habitual actions, gestures, and postures” (157).

References

Hayles, N. Katherine. (2008). Electronic Literature. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Walker, Jill. (1999). “Piecing together and tearing apart: finding the story in afternoon.” Retrieved 10/10/2008 from http://jilltxt.net/txt/afternoon.html.

Note: all of the electronic texts discussed in this essay were included on the Electronic Literature Collection Volume 1 CDROM provided with Electronic Literature.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Sonia Stephens for editorial assistance.