Colloquium
Beyond
Art? Digital Culture in the Twenty-first Century Colloquium
The
Organisers:
|
Literature and the Digital
Media Peter
Howard Poet http://www.hphoward.demon.co.uk/poetry/ Personal
computers doubtless have great potential for extending the boundaries of
literature in all sorts of ways. Such literature is, of course, accessible
only to those who can afford the technology and are able to learn how to use
it. We are on the threshold of this becoming a reality: already there are
writers who use digital media exclusively, but there are also many readers
who do not access them, either through technophobia, or indifference. 100
years ago children would read to their illiterate parents, and today, parents
are being shown how to use computers by their children. In many senses,
there's nothing new. In many others, it's all new. The
Internet breaks down geographical boundaries, but can't do anything to change
the human desire to form communities. People still tend to be very
territorial in cyberspace, establishing new, virtual communities. e.g. email lists, newsgroups, CompuServe and AOL forums,
web-based discussion groups. The Multi-User Dimension Object Oriented
programs (MOOs for short) construct models of
buildings, where people can move around, look at things, modify the
structure, and 'talk' to each other. LinguaMOOs,
pioneered by Cynthia Haynes and Jan Rune Holmevik
are MOOs designed for writing. In a sense they
models of literary societies, where people can write, share their work and so
on. These new social structures are where any new literature will be forged.
They are culturally and geographically more diverse, but I foresee that
writers will still tend to team up with others with common aspirations and
outlooks. Email,
and to a lesser extent Usenet newsgroups, enables the establishment of
geographically diverse writing communities, but it is of course the World
Wide Web that is causing important changes in the nature of the writing product
and the method by which it is distributed. The
changes in the method of distribution arise from the fact that anyone who can
access literature published on the Web can also publish their own, on almost
equal terms. The economics are entirely different - the fact that with print
publishing it's expensive to produce, market and distribute the product tends
to restrict the number of authors whose works are made available. Since books
are expensive, people will tend to buy ones by authors whose work they already
know and like. Thus publishers will tend to publish books by people whose
work is already known. Web publishing flattens these literary hierarchies,
and a new literary politics is emerging from the changed economics. At
present, those economics are trivial - almost nobody gets paid for publishing
on the Web - and this leads to politics approaching anarchy. If your poem is
accepted by a print publication, you're likely to get some remuneration, even
if that consists solely of a complimentary copy. On the Web, you don't even
get that. There have been some attempts to generate revenue from Web
literature, such as Chadwyck-Healey's Literature
Online project. This is a huge database of literary works, accessible via the
Web. But the project is based on the print publication economic paradigm, and
I suspect it will be forced to change its approach. It charges large
subscription fees that make it unaffordable to everyone except specialist
libraries. Such a subscription-based service would be impractical for personal
home pages and Internet magazines. Why should I pay to subscribe to one ezine, when there are dozens of others I can view for
free? More appropriate methods for a small Web publisher to generate income
might include hosting advertisements, or the idea of the 'millicent'
charge, whereby a mechanism is established to make very small charges for
viewing individual Web pages. Readers
invest more than money in reading; they also invest their time. This will
dilute the anarchic effect I mentioned earlier, since authors and sites will
acquire reputations and 'brand names' that will attract readers to new
content that they produce. However, Web publishing will result in a much
broader range of writers being read, and a weakening of the 'authority' that
being published by a prestigious name currently gives. This will be part of
the wider reduction in any received authority of what is worthwhile,
important or even 'true.' The
Web also severely curtails the effectiveness of attempts at censorship. An
example of this is if you look in the Penguin Book of Homosexual Verse for
James Kirkup's poem "The Love that Dares to
Speak its Name" you'll find the page blank. If you want to read the
poem, spend five minutes on the Web with a search engine. Many
writers are concerned about losing copyright on the Web. Copyright still
applies, of course, but it's much easier to breach it. For most Web based
literature at the moment, it's not a serious issue. First, nobody wants to
steal your work: they'd much prefer to use the Web space to host their own.
Secondly, writers currently publish on the Web to be read, not to make money,
so if someone did copy their work, they'd just be getting more readers. When
money starts to become involved, the problem will become more serious. There
will be, and already is, a cultural schism between print and cyberspace. Most
print-published authors do not appear on the Web. Conversely, there are
writers well-known on the Web, who have no print
publications to their credit. I believe this split will remain, but grow less
obvious in the next few years. Print publishers will find ways to make their
authors' works available via the Web, and writers who have established a name
for themselves via the Web will find themselves more attractive to print
publishers. There will also be an increase in the number of privately
produced booklets and pamphlets, as writers with a Web presence find there is
a demand for print versions of their work. There is still a strong preference
even amongst those who spend a lot of time on the Internet, to read
literature from the page, rather than from the screen. The
World Wide Web also changes the nature of literature, most dramatically with
the simple, but powerful concept of hypertext. Hypertext isn't new - the term
and concept were invented by Ted Nelson in 1960 - but it really needs a
computer both for its construction and for its consumption. Nor does it
necessarily need the World Wide Web, which can often be too slow a medium for
the ideal presentation of hypertext. But the widespread availablity
of Web browsers, and the ease of distribution of hypertexts via the Internet,
have contributed enormously to the growth of
hypertext literature. Another important factor is that Web audiences are
already familiar with the grammar of hypertext - they know how to use a
mouse, what clues indicate something might be worth clicking on, and what is
likely to happen when they do. The
most obvious point about hypertext literature is that it emphasises the
deconstruction of the text, by providing ways for each reader to find their
own way through it. It's actually a little more complex than this, though. I
know of one Web poet who restricts the freedom of her readers by forcing a
specific route through her texts. With a book, you can choose to read it
backwards, but the hypertext author controls all the possible ways of reading
the work. As
the technology of the internet advances, it becomes possible to provide more
than just the text itself. Colour, images, typography, layout, sounds, video
all become candidates for inclusion in the work. This is exciting, but there
are also dangers that the special effects detract from the work if not
carefully handled, and that the effects are expected. The simple poem is no
longer enough - readers expect to be viewers and listeners as well. Perhaps
this is symptomatic of a wider change in attitude to culture - we expect not
only the book, but the film, not only the song but the pop video as part of
the package. And attention spans of readers do tend to be shorter. This is
possibly partly to compensate for the intensity of the multimedia assault on
the senses, but it's also partly down to the knowledge that viewing costs
time and money, and that there is a whole lot more out there to explore. Hypertext
literature is still very new, but I expect it to mature over the next few
years. The maturity will be acquired both by the writers and the readers, and
will result in works that use the technology selectively and appropriately
for what they are trying to achieve. I also expect there to be more
interactive projects - just as people link to each others' pages, so they
will pool ideas and creativity into collaborative hypertext works. Peter
Howard |
Extracted from http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ctitext2/beyond/howard.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés López
© Gemma Verdú Trescolí
vertres@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press