Following my reading of Chapter 3 in Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace, I am left with lingering thoughts and certain questions about particular aspects regarding the critical intersection between academic humanities and technology.
I wish to further explore Murray’s idea of “multimedia” as a medium through which storytellers potentially discover how to tell their stories more effectively. Under this idea, Murray examines what it means for a medium to be “digitally sophisticated” which she explains through the capabilities of digital narratives such as an internet soap opera which she contends can be “sophisticated” if it provides features like “audio as an integral part of the plotline” such that readers are more interested in the story itself rather than the technology used to convey said story (67, 68). Here, I wish to expand upon Murray’s exploration of the influence of multimedia in movies, Web soaps, and books and add to her list podcasts and audiobooks that likewise employ aspects of “dramatic richness” through inclusion of technological resources such as “the wiretap of a murder threat or a political negotiation” (68). To this end, I believe that podcasts and audiobooks as sources of digital humanities and alternatives to traditional oral – person to person – storytelling provide an interesting conceptualization of what Murray terms “electronic narrative art” (68). One of my favorite podcasts which I believe assumes Murray’s standards of dramatic richness and electronic narrative art is Dr. Death – give it a listen.
Using our continuous discourse about affordances as they relate to books versus electronic literature as a launching point, I turn to Murray’s final affordance of four relating to digital environments: “Digital Environments Are Encyclopedic” (83). I found this particular affordance the most intriguing in that it further revealed to me the disconnect between academic structures of access to resources versus technological, or digital, approaches to encyclopedic accessibility. During the summer of 2019, I collaborated with a Davidson College English Professor in the process of publishing a book at Duke University Press. He wished to create for his book a digital archive as an electronic receptacle in which to provide sources cited within his book thus producing an accessible electronic platform to view and retrieve relevant materials. This experience strongly correlates to Murray’s belief in the “encyclopedic capacity of the computer” to grant readers access “from any point on the globe” (84). However, ideas about the accessibility of materials in relation to the competitive nature of humanities academia and the way that competitive – and almost capitalistic – attitude interacts with digital environments lingers with me because while many more resources are available to users through the internet a strong disconnect remains between the prestige seeking egos of academic scholars who wish to make exclusive their work and the highly collaborative and open-access spaces of digital humanities and computer science communities at large. Nevertheless, as I learned through my research last summer, Davidson College professors are working to make smoother the intersection between technology and academic humanities.
Lastly, I leave readers with a moment in Murray’s work I continue to muse over. She writes, “the encyclopedic capacity of the computer can distract us from asking why things work the way they do and why we are being asked to play one role rather than another” (89). It is important to remember that games such as SimCity that simulate life, are in fact not modeled based on real life but rather certain perspectives on it. Thus, the conflation of the game simulation and real experience I believe Murray claims can be dangerous.