To be less afraid to use instinct as a guide. If a little red flag keeps going off in your head, it’s generally a sign that something isn’t right, even if others are saying otherwise. Communicators generally have good antenna, and we need to ask the hard questions without fear.
Love this. I don't know if I can count the times I've ignored that red flag only to have it backfire in some way.
Moretti argued that the novel was well established when at least one novel was published every week. With 58 documented works published in 2011, 45 of which are in English, and presumably many more works not yet documented in the ELMCIP Knowledge Base, we are definitely have reached that point for electronic literature in English, though not within all languages.
For me this raises a question of whether e-lit is really inclusive/who it's really for given that there are different levels of ability with and access to computers across cultures and generations.
Students inculcated from birth by digital media will ultimately be the final arbiters of its popularity and growth.
Part of me disagrees with this/doesn't think it's necessarily so. I recently read a book surveying YouTube's rise in popularity and the authors noted that some of the most popular vlogs there weren't by people who supposedly grew up with technology and making video but rather people who were in their twenties and thirties....?
"literary works created with the use of a computer for the electronic medium such that they cannot be experienced in any meaningful way without the mediation of an electronic device"
Along with the later note about electronic literature being "born digital", this suggests that electronic literature is inherently tied to its medium/the medium is part of the message of the piece... so it differs from simply being electronic because, in particular in the case of books that are then made into e-books, it can't be remediated without something (meaning) being lost.
archiving
I'm curious about the use of the term "archiving" here. The way pieces display is sometimes machine dependent (mac vs. pc, etc.) and as technology progresses certain pieces may lose their compatibility with browsers/operating systems. In particular I'm thinking of some flash pieces that we looked at in another class I took on e-lit that students either couldn't pull up or get to display correctly because the plugins on their computer were too advanced for the piece to work with them.
Also, what is a piece of e-lit then/after they don't work? What do pieces of e-lit become when people no longer know how to navigate or read them?
proprietary concerns, authors working in new media need the support of institutions that can advocate for the preservation, archiving, and free circulation of literary work.
I'm interested in seeing how issues of control and censorship play out in the future. We talked a lot in one of my classes about looking at who "controls" the stories, so I'd be curious to see who ends up "controlling" e-lit as it moved forward.
The confrontation with technology at the level of creation is what distinguishes electronic literature from, for example, e-books, digitized versions of print works, and other products of print authors “going digital.”
This reminds me a little bit of Richard Lanham's The Economics of Attention, especially his conversation about looking at versus looking through. If confrontation with technology is part of e-lit, then it's self-conscious and reflective of its medium and also, at least in some cases makes readers look at it rather than through it. (And the medium/how e-lit is presented is part of the message it conveys.) (According to Lanham we typically look through text/aren't aware of the medium.)