Author: hcarp

Rettberg states that the forms of network writing he detailed all share one thing in common- that through their self-reflexive nature they “encourage audiences to reconsider the situation of the human in the contemporary network apparatus.” Rettberg also states that the works all “provide us with opportunities to defamiliarize and rethink the ways that we engage with the network”, but what if instead, the works provided us with opportunities to defamiliarize and rethink the ways in which the network engages with us? From challenging corporate control of the internet to confusing the NSA, all of these products seem more interested in messing with the system rather than making us think about why the system needs to be messed with in the first place.

Network Effect, on the other hand, immediately makes me think about how I, and the human race as a whole, interact with the network. Opening with the message that

“YOUR TIME HERE IS LIMITED

From your IP address, we see you live in The United States, where the average life expectancy is 78.4 years — so after 7.84 minutes (7:50), your access will be blocked for a day, so you can get back to your life.”

serves to open the conversation by making a user wonder how the webpage can get that information before they have even seen the website. With words such as grieve, meditate, laugh, play, puke, smile, eat, cry, destroy, and fly displayed in alphabetical order, the project uses a wide variety of verbs both positively and negatively associated. Including metrics such as the dominant gender that partakes in the verb and the percentage of male or females that partake in the said verb, a graph detailing the action’s rise through the years, changing headlines pertaining to the verb, the number of people who are currently doing the verb and people interacting with the verb to some capacity on social media, as well as video footage of people interacting in some way with the verb, as well as being superimposed over the sound of a heartbeat continually grounds the user and reminds them of their humanity and the humanity of those they are watching throughout the experience. Network Effect ends with

“Your vision will become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes.” —Carl Jung

LEARN MORE

To see more, please wait”,

and then a countdown begins at 24 hours- a lasting message left for a user to ponder both what lais inside their own heart and what happens after the 24 hours is done.

Once the 24 hours is up, a user simply returns to the starting page of the experience. Is this a statement about the endless cycle of interaction with the internet we find ourselves in today?

I was slightly taken aback at Rettberg’s suggestion that a new role for the human poet could be editing “poetry entirely generated by machine intelligence based on a process that remains both invisible and largely incomprehensible for the human poet” (53). Typically, I feel that we steer clear from or at the very least caution against giving artificial intelligence space with which it can overtake humankind (Hello Disney’s Smart House and Wall-E), but here Rettberg, by impartiality, seems open and even acceptive of the notion that artificial intelligence could further develop and become sophisticated enough to write poetry for us.

It should be emphasized that Rettberg is not, indeed, for or against the processes which he describes, as his book explores electronic literature rather than advocating for it (although the exposure garnered from writing about it could very well be considered advocacy), I began to think about the process of getting to the point of wanting to develop some sort of computer software that could write something we consider as intellectually engaging as poetry. More specifically, I want to know why. Are these people ruining the integrity of human-made writing? Computer-made poems aren’t thought to be the most profound, but Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey, a book of poetry mimicking the most famous six-second vine video scripts, isn’t either. Computers aren’t that smart when it comes to syntax, but neither are we nowadays; who is go say what has or hasn’t been written by a computer nowadays. Or are these people just interested in exploring the limitations of computers and thought that poetry would be the easiest thing to start with? After all, it isn’t that hard to find an assortment of words to go together and make a haiku and many of the computer programs that create poems hardly make sense. Or are they exploring a rebranding or redefining of poetry, one without preconceived constraints placed on it from practically the beginning of time? Up until this new digital era, poetry was permanent once it was printed on the page; now, it can be changed at the drop of a hat with a delete key or, in the case of Abra, a swish of a finger. It will certainly be interesting to see where poetry goes with this added technical nuance.

This new form of interactive fiction is more storylike than games like “The Baron” or “Shade”, although they remain just as sinister and outlandish. Between what we have read about and experienced ourselves, there don’t seem to be a lot of overtly positive interactive fiction games, and I wonder why that is. I believe that overall, stories that end well aren’t as captivating as games that give people the creeps to some degree, and people are more likely to want to solve a twisted game that they don’t have a clue where it is going.

We spoke in class on Friday about the affordances and downfalls of the games we had been discussing. I think that games like “My Father’s Long, Long Legs” and “Power to the People” and even “Queers in Love at the End of the World” are much less stressful to play because they are more narrative; the player doesn’t have to do the hard thinking, they can just choose what comes next in the story and let the computer do the playing. This does, I think, take away a certain degree of control that a player has in previous games we discussed, but I think that players (or maybe just most people in our class) prefer to have their decisions made for them instead of aimlessly searching for what the computer wants them to do next. The narrative structure of the game also gives it a more gauntlet or maybe loop-and-grow feel (to use Ashwell’s terminology) than “Shade”, “The Baron” or many of our CYOA books.

One of the things that interested me most about our readings were the short stories that we were assigned. In both, the books mentioned tested the limits of the affordances of books we had previously discussed while also reinforcing others. Take Ts’ui Pen’s Forking Graden, for example. While the labyrinth is volumetric, it appears to be only sequential as opposed to both sequential and random access. The Book of Sand seems to be both sequential and random access, but surely not finite because the pages multiply and rearrange every time the narrator opens its cover. Of course, neither of these books written about are real books; both exist within the finite boundaries of the short stories in which they were created. This does, however, raise a few observations and questions for me. Borges wrote “The Book of Sand” in 1975, “The Garden of Forking Paths” in 1941. This means that people have been imagining and playing with the notion of books existing beyond their most basic affordances as early as 1941. Borges paints said notion as being a magical, mythical occurrence, but the notion of books existing beyond their covers has become more real than imaginary with the creation of computers and the internet allowing people to expand upon books in a multi-faceted way with the opportunity to encompass more facets than imaginable. Take Queers in Love at the End of the World, for example. If written into a traditional book, the story would only have one ending and one way to get there. Since Anthropy created the story online, however, the story is allowed over one hundred different storylines and even embodies the acute sense of time Forking Paths begins to explore (although in the opposite sense of time limiting what one can glean from a story). The age of electronics has muddled the affordances of the codex we read about from Kirschenbaum, but what are some affordances that technology has served to offer to literature?