Author: juscott

“Network Effects” provides users with an experience of human life mediated through the capacity of an online network. Upon entering the text, readers/users are presented with the statement “Your time here is limited”, a phrase that the authors of the piece say induces a sense of anxiety and a fear of missing out on the entire piece within the scope of how long they have to explore. Using the IP address of the computer the user is viewing Network Effects from, the site determines a time limit based upon the home country of the computer and its user. Ultimately the choice to provide this defined of a limit enhances the user’s experience with the text, constantly negotiating not just the time limits of exploration but those of life. Once the “life” of the piece is over, users are barred from accessing the site again for 24 hours and encourages them to return to their normal life. This feature of the text immediately made me think back to our discussion on the affordances of books. In its own way, Network Effects is a finite text, limited by time of access. However, the ability to re-access the text after 24 hours, and the ability for the computer to recognize this time constraint, modifies that affordance of a finite text seen in a physical book to the digital space.

My own interaction with the piece was one filled with awe and fascination. Perhaps the most pivotal moment in my experience was when I first recognized the heartbeat constantly pulsing within the cacophony of sound, video, and information bombarding my senses. Witnessing the physical sound take hold of the image and beat within the videos grounded my experience in the idea of a lifetime. Again, I thought about the idea of finiteness as an affordance of text that mimics life.

Throughout these past two weeks, following the abrupt end of my senior year and Davidson experience, the idea of finite moments has preoccupied a lot of my now ample free time. I’ve constantly been grappling with the idea that moments happen and exist only within a certain time and space and are over just as quickly as they came. Moments are always ahead but what they contain is unknown, just like how when clicking on a word, a user of “Network Effects” is unaware of the facts, sounds, and videos of life they will encounter. Ultimately, looking at “Network Effects” through the lens of my present experience enabled me to grapple with thoughts of moments and endings and life in a way previously foreign to me and cope with the progression of life, albeit too fast

Overall, “Network Effects” is without a doubt one of my favorite pieces from this class and from my experience at Davidson (and as an English major I’ve encountered a lot of texts/pieces). In fact, after finishing my own viewing I copied the link and sent it along to my friends and family to explore for themselves.

Of the games for this week, I was most intrigued by “16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonald’s”. Initially, I was struck by the shifts of color along with the narrative, moving between black, red, and green that effectively mimicked the feeling of movement throughout the space. Relatively dark, more ominous colors envelop the space in darkness.

After completing my first playthrough of the game, I was caught off guard upon entering the final screen, revealing all 16 possibilities for killing the Vampire. The presence of this screen evoked a very game-like atmosphere, despite having gone into my engagement with the piece.

For me, the game-like atmosphere took away from the ability to actually read the piece more than once. While reading through the alternative endings, I thought back to our conversation in class surrounding the role of guides and/or walkthroughs when engaging with electronic literature. “16 Ways to Kill a Vampire at McDonald’s” complicated this conversation. Though I find the use of external cheats/guides/etc. to disrupt the reading of electronic texts, Abigail Corfman’s intentional inclusion of the possibility list and hints makes the help part of the internal, textual experience.

Subsequent gameplay ultimately was affected by viewing the list and hints. In my own experience, even after only my first playthrough, reading the hints I was familiar enough with the game space to recognize what the hints were pointing narrator Lucy/the player towards. With each successive playthrough, I found myself going through the motions, increasingly aware of the space and the choices presented to me rather than using the narrative to find a way to get rid of the vampire (as I had done the first time). Though the narrative progressed in unique ways depending on the choices made, knowing the possibilities made engagement with the text feel limited.

Overall, I enjoyed the game-like atmosphere of the piece, especially being caught off-guard by this feature in the beginning, however; I find my enjoyment based more upon the play-ability of the piece rather than the literary/narrative merit (though the world was well-crafted, the text became less of a focus).

While completing today’s assignment, I particularly enjoyed my time exploring Judy Malloy’s “Uncle Roger”. Malloy’s integration of more traditional text (in the form of short storytelling poems), with hyperlinks enabling readers to chart their own story within the poems, well-illustrated the non-linear storytelling potential of hypertext. Though the poems themselves were fixed, the ability for readers to “randomly” select the next poem in their larger narrative (sight-unseen), mimics the randomly accessible affordance of print literature. After clicking through the first “File” of “Uncle Roger”, I began thinking of successive clicks of the hyperlinks to the act of flipping the pages of a more traditional print text. However, unlike a print text, hyperlinks, though listed in an order, don’t require readers to engage with them in any particular way, nor with all of the sections. In fact, after making many clicks through the various hyperlinks, certain options became unavailable, ultimately adding the effect that certain storylines couldn’t occur after certain “actions” were taken. Readers make these actions almost arbitrarily, being given vague terms like “jane”, “food and drink”, and “semiconductor chips”, to choose from when constructing their own narrative from the poetic pieces. The second and third “File’s”‘ enable readers to make similarly arbitrary decisions by clicking one of three picture-links surrounding the text or an unlabeled key on a keyboard, respectively. Ultimately, through “Uncle Roger”, Malloy presents readers with the opportunity to engage with traditional text in a non-linear format while taking advantage of hyper-links and construct a hypertext of fixed pieces.

Today’s reading also prompted me to consider the role of hyperlinks and hypertext in my own online experiences. Nelson’s conception of, “a literature”, as, “a web of interconnecting documents”, enabled me to establish an understanding of how hypertexts fit into my typically more restricted definition of literature (Rettberg). More commonly thinking of the “canon” of print texts read in English classrooms, I never before considered the potential for seemingly unrelated texts I discover online to be literature in their own right. I began to think of my own experiences on Wikipedia, a website on which I frequently fall into a hole of clicking hyperlinks until I forget the place I started. Before reading Nelson’s conception of literature, I never would’ve considered my forrays into the depths of Wikipedia or times playing the Wikipedia Game with friends in middle school, as literary acts. Now reflecting on these experiences through Nelson’s lens, I regard them in a new light. Though clicking through links from an event, to a space, to an object, to a person, (and so on) doesn’t necessarily construct a clean narrative, the underlying logic constructs a web of text, or literature, and so engaging with a platform like Wikipedia, enables users to participate in a literary experience without picking up a book, or reading an article. Considering the plethora of information readily available on such sites, the literature constructed through hyperlinks then becomes essentially infinite and nearly entirely customizable by each reader, an affordance print text cannot achieve.

Ultimately, consideration of “Uncle Roger” and the affordances of hypertexts enabled by Nelson’s definition of literature, prompt me to ask the class the extent to which they agree with Nelson’s understanding of literature, and the infinite texts that subsequently contribute to the modern literary canon?