New Technologies Essay

Jayne Hipgrave (67681)
FdA Applied Literary Studies
7th December 2005

Published without hyperlinks, see emailed copy for these.

Discuss the relationship between any chosen aspects of New Technology and literature.


New technology has created a labyrinth of diversity for literature along which many new strands of expression have been created and developed. This new art form no longer seems to rely on the printed word, and would in some cases be actually hindered and restricted by the linear page turning of conventional literature. It is almost as if the book has outgrown its cover and, like a teenager, wants to explore the world outside the boundaries of its parents, the novel. For some, the problem with new technology is the fact that it continually changes, like a volcano permanently erupting new ideas that expand or mutate into something else very quickly. The reader is presented with a multitude of new styles all surging forward at once in different directions, which can create a sense of not being able to stand still and take stock for fear of missing the next new concept. There is an overwhelming sense of disorientation, especially for the not so computer literate, who may find the overload of unconventional ideas too much to grapple with, and this may cause them to reject the new forms of literature. Some of the developments seem so strange and different that without an open mind they could hardly be considered as literature at all, but then, on the other hand, their very artistic, avant guard nature is what makes them so compelling to others. The thing to remember here is that in historical terms, we are crawling through the infant stages of a new era, we are right in the thick of every author’s experiments. Today’s readers are the guinea pigs wading through both the good and the not so good, we are the ones who will help to decide what goes forward and what ends up in the recycle bin.


New technology has not only provided literature with reading material, there are also tools to help us to ‘write for success’. The Writer’s Dreamkit by Dramatica is a software package designed to help the craft of story writing, it is advertised as ‘The key to writing stories that sell’. The program leads the user through the writing process, frequently asking questions and prompting them to make choices and review what they are writing. This is a useful tool for aspiring writers who need guidance, it’s as if the Dreamkit sits at your side like some sort of instant editor. It presents us with pictures of characters to choose from, and lists of personality traits so that the writer can recall at a glance what the people inside their stories look and behave like. Then throughout the writing process the author is frequently asked to refer to his original choices and review them.
The kit creates a kind of objective perspective from where the user can see things from a less personal point of view, they are made to constantly step outside the world of their story and check what they have written. This kind of analysis has to be useful from the point of view of marketing and sales, but it does seem to take the feeling and emotion away from the writing. Surely this kind of interruption for a writer in the early stages could actually hinder the creative process by disrupting the flow of concentration and imagination. Maybe an author needs to remain personally attached to his work until it is finished, being allowed to live inside the world of the story so that he will remain true to the emotions and feelings within it. So perhaps having an editor on your shoulder every step of the way could be more detrimental than helpful?

A version of the software with more simplified language would be particularly useful for primary schools, where children usually make their first attempts at story writing. Getting their stories to link together smoothly can be a problem for many young writers, and this kit will help them to pull their ideas together and think more clearly about how everything needs to connect. Dramatica tells us that,
“There are really only five central concepts that you'll need to know to understand all that follows. Thankfully, they can be explained in less than one page each. They are:
1. The Story Mind (click here)
2. The Overall Story Throughline (click here)
3. The Main Character Throughline (click here)
4. The Impact Character Throughline (click here)
5. The Main Character vs. Impact Character Throughline (click here)”

This is the kind of formula many children and adults would benefit from when learning how to write stories, it provides them with a toolkit of important areas to think about and develop so that they can work with more confidence. But how far do we take this? Does there need to be a point when the Writer’s Dreamkit is packed away so that our own minds and imagination are allowed to blossom?

From a Marxist angle, this software can actually restrict and control the writer. On the one hand the program seems to give us immense freedom and choice, but actually, there is an element of control and conformity. We are bound by a list of options, the program puports to have 32,768 storyforms, but what about the person who wants to write the 32,769th storyform? The computer is the capitalist boss in charge, thinking purely of profit, and the multitudes of writers are like the proletariats, being given a list of options instead of total freedom of choice. This means that the writing created has perhaps lost some of its individual identity, it is no longer completely true to the natural way that the author would write. He is confined by the limitations of the package, the medium he is working with has transformed him into one of the masses at the bottom of the triangle.
This idea of using a writing tool also demonstrates the Marxist view that artists increasingly have to treat their work in a cold, capitalist way,
“In the arts, for instance, commodification leads artists to hawk their works anxiously to gain profits in an impersonal, competitive market.”
(1 p15 )
Their writing has changed from being a personal work of art into a formula that sells. This software package highlights the way that society has developed to become increasingly commercial, it promotes the idea of writing for profit and commercial gain, rather than for individual aesthetic development. So many books have gone before us now that marketing specialists can analyse what works, or more coldly, what sells. They are like ‘Big Brother’, watching and analysing the trends of the audience to see what kinds of literature are going to make them the largest profits. They are able to forecast the market and publish accordingly, but this in turn can actually push the readers in a particular direction rather than giving them the option of something new. As with the software’s limitations on the writer, the choices have also been limited for us as readers.

From the point of view of Feminism, the kit is the protecting, nurturing mother, making sure we follow the right path, but more negatively it makes us dependent and subservient, believing that without it we cannot succeed. It takes away our free will, making us subordinate and inferior, we can get so far with our own ideas and then we come up against a wall that questions our judgements and takes away the confidence we had in our own free creative process. Fear of failure convinces us to passively and unquestioningly obey the software in order to get the results we want. This however, actually means that the writer is inevitably,
“Kept…from developing their intellectual capacities.” (2 p53)

Freudian also applies in a similar way, the kit is like the Super Ego, damping down the raw talent, or Id, influencing our decisions and compressing our ideas into something that is acceptable and integrates with the outside world of readers. It teaches the writer the most effective way to survive in the commercial world. The Ego is the cold reality of ‘no sales’, making the writer realise that unless he plays safe and sticks to the formula, no one will publish his books. His original words are like the unconscious mind, and the software is the conscious mind, pushing down upon it and distorting the ideas into something marketable.

The trend driven, materialistic society of the Western world has rocketed the cost of living, pushing us all into a corner where we are afraid or unable to take financial risks. The Writer’s Dreamkit fits neatly into this way of life, promoting conformity over free will, and a writer on the dole will perhaps feel that he has no choice other than to play safe, compromising his ideas and working to the formula that will sell copies and earn money. This also means that he will unfortunately be stuck in a rut when the trends change and the formula no longer works. The exciting, ground breaking fiction is what builds up the ‘giant’s shoulders’, the peaks from where other writers can see the way, while software packages like the Writer’s Dreamkit will perhaps be the bland food that fills his belly.


Blogs are at the opposite end of the literary spectrum, they give the writer total independence and authority over their work, blogging is the online, instant and completely individual way to self publish. They were originally on-line diaries but have since mushroomed into the new way of communicate our thoughts to the outside world, becoming a form of,
“Direct peer-to-peer journalism.” (3)
Bloggs are now like a mass media army, talking and debating about as many different topics as there are blogspots.
Some blogs remain completely personal, still written like a diary, the users posts photographs of themselves and talk about their day to day lives. Even these sites seem to have journalistic tendencies though, for instance if they are writing about a film they watched at the pictures, the blog becomes more like a review than a diary entry. In a bid to obtain privacy, there are sites written in code so that no one else except for other members of the ‘group’ will understand what is being written. People with similar interests will communicate through blogs and this creates a kind of ‘hobby blog’, a website dedicated to one particular subject. With the opportunity for free speech, it is obvious that there will be political sites where people can air their views to the nation. Of course, we can’t have free web sites without the Marxist capitalism of someone trying to cash in on the airtime. So many blogspots are trying to sell us something, posting comments to the blogs and asking the writer to visit their site, this was posted as a ‘comment’ to one of my blogs, as you can see it is full of hyperlinks, all directing me to the same loan company,
“kredietlenenhypotheken said...
Hi Blogger,
Surely a nice blog you have here! Very informative!
I have a site about lening. This means loan.
You may want to come and visit sometimes! I hope you do not mind me bookmarking your blog, so I can come back sometimes!
Hope to see you on my lening site.
Regards,
Walter
3:47 PM”
The fact that these sites are completely unedited means that there is no censorship, any sort of propaganda or undesirable information could be broadcast across the web and accessed by anyone, including children, without any previous screening. So where we have previously looked at publishing houses and editors in a controlling, negative light, in this instance, perhaps its not such a bad idea for someone to be filtering these blogspots before we have to see them. Also, the publishers don’t own our work, but then neither do we, once published it becomes global property, out there for anyone to read and use in whatever way they like.

From a Marxist and indeed a Feminist perspective we can see here that these are the proletariats or underdogs fighting back. There are so many voices in the world today that it is increasingly more difficult to make ourselves heard, especially when society is very much controlled by the affluent and powerful. Bloggers are the masses of individuals revolting amidst the social conflict, fighting back against capitalist control to maintain their own identity, they are free to write whatever they want with no constraints. Yet, within this world of freedom, it’s as if communities are springing into life, creating their own set of social structures,
Elite
Politics
Sales sites
Secret code sites
Special interest/hobby
Writers trying to self publish
Diary Keepers blogging for fun

and another Marxist triangle is born, from the ordinary everyday diary keepers at the bottom to the wealthy elitists showing off their yachts. So while trying to maintain our individuality and freedom, we have infact jumped from one overcrowded world into another, diving headfirst into a vast sea of voices all shouting to be heard at once. As with any social structure, it is the strongest who survive, and we can see this straight away just by viewing a few blogs at random, they all seem to have reams of eager postings, hungrily awaiting a response, and almost all of them sadly have empty comments boxes. This means that blogging has created its own false consciousnes, we imagine that publishing our thoughts has empowered us, and that we mean something to the blogging world. In truth we most probably remain as silenced as ever because there are too many of us for anyone to take any notice of what we’ve written.
Blogging is a product of the Post-Modern world, everything is intertwined as a complete merging of diverse ideas takes place. There are many different fragments, branching off in opposite directions, while at the same time they are intrinsically linked to all of the other blogs out there.

Cyber poems are the new way of creating poetry on the net. Rather than simply the written word, they are a creative combination of all the arts. A great deal of poetry seems to start from one singular event, usually a defining moment in the life of the poet that moves them to a point of expression, and compelling them to put their feelings into words. Cyber poetry uses a creative combination of all the arts to embody this concept even more vividly. Epimone, is a site which promotes the use of a single,
“rethoric figure that implies the repetition of the same word in order to stress something.” (4)
This figure then, will be presented with coloured moving images and even sound to enhance the meaning and feeling evoked by the word. For example, Poema bomba by Augusto de Campos uses the letters from the title of the poem, putting them randomly in a cluster at the centre of the screen, then they gradually spread out and grow outwards, giving the impression of an explosion. At the same time we hear the words ‘poema’ and ‘bomba’ repeated and overlapped to created an audible explosion, ending with one voice saying, ‘bomba’ which sounds like ‘boom’ to English ears. The background is red and the letters are yellow, the colour of fire, flames and fuses. Everything about the poem relates to explosion and so even if we don’t speak Italian, we can get the full, true meaning of the poem.
In the same way, Mutason, by Julien d’Abrigeon, takes us through the stages of life, ‘Bebe, infant, adolecent, adult, vieillard’, and ‘neant’, these words appear separately on the screen, one mutating into the next, demonstrating how each stage of our life is a metamorphosis of the last. The audio part of the poem is a low, muffled voice repeating a pattern of words rhythmically, like a heart beat, followed by a break, obviously representing the cessation of life. The fact that the voice is muffled gives the poem a kind of foetal quality, which gradually gets lost as the poem progresses away from the infant stage.
The visual and audio effects of both of these poems make them accessible to everyone, we don’t have to speak the language to understand the messages they convey. This brings us to the conclusion that many poems are about the evocation of feelings rather than the words themselves. Another example of this is L’escala de Richter, by Lluis Calvo which, although we may not be able to understand the words of the poem, gives us a definite impression of what an earthquake may be like in the way that it makes the whole screen vibrate fiercely. These poems are like impressionist paintings, capturing an emotion or mood rather than a crystal clear image, and attempting to recreate the same feelings inside the reader’s mind. It’s as if the poems are trying to reach us on another level, rather than one that is purely literary. At first the visual artistry and audio enhancement of the work can seem confusing and obscure, yet it does seem to reach us on an internal level, one that fits in quite well with Freudian psychoanalysis,
“Nonsense is meaningful and that disistortion is inescapable and creative.” (1 p16)

These poems are a true example of Post Modernism. They are fragmented, displaying only a few words at a time on the screen so that we have to concentrate and fit the poem together like a jigsaw, an element of ‘play’ is clearly evident to the reader. The use of audio, visual art pulls in ideas from outside of the literary world to create the ‘feeling’ or message of the poem spontaneously, having a more instant effect on the senses of the reader. They are taken straight to their subconscious rather than having to get there through deep analysis of the words and rhyme schemes. These poems are very experimental, pushing boundaries, using any medium they can to help to get their message across in an interactive way. From a Feminist perspective, the reader is like a child, being let through play towards understanding. There is also an element of control here, as we have to wait patiently for each element of the poem to evolve, we cannot speed up the process, we have to be obedient, or otherwise the program will end and go back to the beginning.

These interactive poems lead us on to interactive fiction, the world of plotless stories where endings never happen. Deena Larsen’s Marble Springs, takes us on what at first seems like a disjointed journey through the story setting. Rather than the conventional opening page, or introduction to a novel, we are presented with a site map and have to choose where we want to go. There is no linear pattern to follow, we are given total freedom to go in whichever direction we choose. The story lacks any sense of plot or form, there is no beginning, middle or end. On first impressions a reader may find it hard to imagine this as a literary work of fiction at all.
The only thing which makes this link into conventional story writing is how it produces a sense of inquisitiveness in the reader, where a book usually sets the opening scene, Deena Larsen’s site map presents us with various hyperlinked settings to choose from. Each one takes us to the various places in Marble Springs and as we navigate our way around, we begin to realise that instead of reading a story, we are presented with a ‘fly on the wall’ perspective of it. Rather than seeing a plot unfold, we are learning the individual stories of every person we come across and finding out how they connect with the other characters. So, we are not sitting on the sofa reading a book, we are actually inside the world of the story, picking up the local gossip and piecing things together ourselves. This kind of story seems to fit today’s modern culture of ‘reality tv’ where we are watching things unfold in front of our eyes and making connections independently, without being given a plot to follow. This makes Marble Springs feel like real life and therefore it can be quite believable for the reader, we are closer to the action.
Where previously we have learned about the characters gradually through the plot line and the action of a story, now we seem to be reading from the opposite end, we learn the story from the perspective of the characters. It’s almost as if modern hypertext fiction realises that we have always read stories to find out about the people within them, and how they interact with each other, it takes us straight there, past the plot and straight to the characters. This fits with the fast living of society today, people seem to want to get everywhere more quickly. It’s as if we don’t want to wade through the superfluous ‘small talk’ of the plot, we want to go straight to the broken hearts and lives of the characters and see how they are coping. Like the Epimone poems, they seem to connect with us on a different level to what has gone before.
We as a culture are so accustomed to plot that the loosely connecting fragments of the story push the boundaries of traditional conventionality in a very Post Modern way. The reader is left with a sense of bewilderment and confusion which encourages the ‘child’ in us to experiment and play with the interactive aspect of the story so that we can learn more. When we look from a Feminist perspective, the ‘fly on the wall’ feeling mentioned earlier does seem to give the reader a restricted view of everything that is going on, and this is where the ‘aerial’, overall view of the conventional novel would make us feel more in control. The restricted view of Marble Springs only gives us a fleeting glance at the whole picture, it’s as if being inside the story gives us a subjective stance rather than an objective one. By keeping us ignorant, we have less power. Although the reader has a map and the freedom to navigate their way around from the inside of the story, the information they glean at each ‘port’ is limited and restricted. This creates a need to return to the map and continue the search, we are as dependent upon it and would be lost without it. The map is the only thing we can confidently rely on.
In some ways the new style of writing excludes certain people, it’s rather like looking at a piece modern art, the readers have to meet the text in a new way, they have to break away from their conventional teachings and be open minded. This could mean that, at the present moment in time, hypertext novels could be considered as intellectual and elitist, creating what feminists would call ‘unequality’ as they are only accessible to the select few who are prepared to move forward with them. No doubt this will change as the rest of society catches up, but it will leave those who are not computer literate behind in the same way that the first novels initially excluded non readers.


These genres demonstrate four of the many different ways in which new Technology has caused literature to erupt out across the world, and yet, the new Technological age cannot escape it’s links with the past. We have always had writing guides, now they are computerised, bloggs are easily a relation of Victorian journals, and the poems and stories are merely treading, or rather racing now, along the same continuous path of development they have always followed. Each new literary period has used the strands of the past as springboards for the future, one era runs into, and interweaves with the next. With theorists continuing to identify and dislocate these strands with individual labels, for example, Medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, Victorian etc. it’s no wonder that we have now arrived at the fragmented mixing pot of Post Modernism. New Technology is surely an accolade to Post Modernism, rather than pushing one particular idea forward, it seems to have picked up aspects of everything that has ever gone before it, and sits spinning them like a giant spider at the centre of the massive world wide web. Every silken line of that web represents another new, transient path for literature to run along, many will be quickly and easily broken, but some will stick and remain forever.
Even though these four genres may seem quite apart and independent from each other, there is one undeniable, inescapable link threading them all together, control. The fact is that once anything becomes interactive, the user becomes the Marxist/Feminist underdog, or the Freudian child, being prompted and led by the computer. As soon as it is switched on, we cease to be independent, free thinking individuals. The most ironic thing about this is that in a Post Modern way, New Technology sets us free, giving us what seems like limitless options, and yet as a society we seem to have been so conditioned to follow the leader that we are still more comfortable with subconscious subservience. We seem to need instructions and feel safe when there are rules and guide lines to follow, blogs demonstrate this most clearly in the way that the bloggers have leapt forward into the Post Modern world only to indirectly set up their own Marxist society structure within the system.
We are living in the infant stages of what is sure to become a great landmark in the history of literature and the internet has meant that more people than ever before can be part of this global development. The analogy of ‘surfing’ the net is a good one because New technology has hit us with a great tidal wave of ‘information overload’. This leaves us with two choices, we can dive onto our surf-boards and ride along on the crest of the new age, or we can be dragged along, drowning in the undercurrents of misunderstanding, being constantly battered by the fragmented debris of Post Modern . In less flowery terms, the inevitable changes are surging forward through time and we can either sink or swim.





REFERENCES:

1) (2001) The Norton Anthology Theory and Criticism
W.W. Norton & Company Inc.
2) (2004) Cambridge contexts in literature Romanticism
Cambridge University Press
3) http://www.andrewsullivan.com/main_article.php?artnum=20020224
4) http://www.Epimone.net/infoEN/index.html

BIBLIOGRAPHY:

Eagleton. Terry (2004) Literary Theory Blackwell Publishing
Wu. Duncan (2005) Romanticism an anthology Third Edition
Blackwell Publishing