Category: Group C

Reflections

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juscott

After reflecting on my blog posts from the semester, I noticed my propensity to focus on my own experience and making a personal connection to whatever piece(s) was/were assigned.

My first post found me reflecting upon a game I played with friends in middle school to personalize the concept of hypertext. Looking at my own experience with creating an information pathway through hyperlinks enabled me to better comprehend a text like “Uncle Roger” not requiring a reader to engage with it in a particular order. By bringing the concept of hypertext into my own realm of tangible understanding, I became able to detach what I knew about print literature from my broader concept of literature (including digital).

In my second post, I reflected upon my experience with the game-play atmosphere of the text “16 Ways to Kill A Vampire at McDonald’s”. Though throughout the semester I came to understand the potential “game”-like vibe of some digital texts, “16 Ways” prompted me to reflect on my own thoughts on the form. Ultimately determining that although the form was engaging, it lacked what I considered to be crucial features of a literary experience.

In my third (and unfortunately final) post, I used the text “Network Effects” to grapple with my final months of senior being detached from Davidson. As I noted in my blog post, I was very taken with the piece, in hindsight perhaps much of my enjoyment came from the headspace I was in when engaging with the text for the first time. The broader idea of fleeting moments narrating the story of one’s life definitely caught me at a time when fleeting moments were all I thought about. I plan to revisit “Network Effect’s” soon, as I approach my final moments as a Davidson student. Though these moments don’t look as I had always thought and dreamed of, their deviations from my expectations are part of my story.

Looking back on my blog posts made me incredibly aware of my tendency to bring the new and unfamiliar into the context of my own life to achieve an understanding. Grounding digital literature in my own tangible digital/personal experience(s) enabled me to breakdown my previous definitions of literature as a print medium, and realize the ever-expanding ways there are to tell a story.

Reflection

anon

Throughout my posts, I made an emphasis on connecting ideas from readings to class discussions or other works. This was a good way of exemplifying topics that we would read about. Another common theme in my posts was how creators in electronic literature distinguish themselves using original ideas. These included rearranging previously written text to create a new work (Sea and Spar Between), confusing Google’s ads (TrackMeNot), and telling a story through a text messaging interface (Bury Me, My Love). All of these vary greatly but are successful in their goals.

The nature of two of my posts did change during the course. These two posts were Originality and Authorship in Regenerated Text and Combinatory Poetics and Personal data privacy and it’s vulnerability. Both of these posts were more rhetorical and theoretical than the other posts. For example, in the ‘originality’ post, I theorized that creators of combinatory poetics were more like “creators rather than authors because of the unintended results that can be produced in pieces.” Then in the ‘personal data’ post, I posed questions regarding if personal data should be private to the individual that it belongs to. I thought these posts both did a good job of doing more than just a simple analysis of the topics at hand. I believe the reason that these posts differed from the others was simply because of my interest and understanding of the topics for those posts. The originality question was one that intrigued me during our class discussions and the personal data question had been discussed in a previous class.

Overall, I thought my posts did a solid job of analyzing topics from readings and making connections with other works that highlighted those topics. When my posts were going to be on something I found interesting, I definitely did a better job of exploring the topic and furthering the discussion.

Reflection on a Semester of Electronic Literature

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hcarp

One of the biggest themes in blog posts of mine for this class (and others, now that I think about it) are ways in which what I am blogging about directly affects society. My first post was titled “The Affordances of the Electronic Codex” and explores the implied history of electronic literature through its invention and many facets. It also notes that “the age of electronics has muddled the affordances of the codex we read about from Kirschenbaum” while questioning “what are some affordances that technology has served to offer to literature?” In another blog post, I weighed the pros and cons of different kinds of interactive fiction and speculated why people preferred one over the other. Along with this theme comes the concern that some technological advances are more harmful to society than good, such as blogging about how The Network Effect emphasizes today’s unhealthy reliance on the internet. I also worry that technology’s attempt to make life easier instead makes life less authentic by allowing technology to alter the human experience in an unethical way. This concern is apparent in my post questioning 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).”

One change I have noticed over the past fifteen weeks is a more acute awareness of how technological design affects a user’s experience, such as the bad spelling and other choice details in How to Rob a Bank heightening socioeconomic disparity in Ted and Lizzie. I had also written a blog about The Network Effect in DIG101 as well, so it was cool to revisit the topic after having explored digital studies in more depth.

My focus on how technology affects us in my blog posts is reflective of my real-life career desires. I took my first digital studies class at the same time I took English 220 and designed not only my own domain to serve as a personal portfolio but a website to serve as a final project. I became fascinated with making my website’s experience as carefully constructed and seamless as possible. When I took DIG101 I learned about the tremendously positive and negative nuances that technology affords society. This semester, DIG220 and 240 has not only helped me to understand those nuances in more depth but has also heightened my desire to fix the negatives and make the positives even better. This theme is something I will definitely revisit during my lifetime as I feel my understanding of it tremendously compliments my English major and allows me to succeed in a more tech-driven world than ever.

Socioeconomics in “How to Rob a Bank”

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hcarp

While playing “How to Rob a Bank”, I noticed about halfway through (and don’t remember if this was the case before I noticed it), that Ted’s spelling wasn’t very good. He searched “Wyld barriers said to eet” and “git away frm a man wit a basbil bat” while he is trapped in the desert and trying to get back to San Antonio in “Part 2: escape”, even though he knew how to spell “how to treat blisters” right before those searches.

Why does Ted all of a sudden lose his ability to spell? Is it a commentary on the type of people (lower socioeconomic status without a lot of formal education) who are stereotypically associated with bank robbing?

In “Part 5: sister, sister”, Lizzie’s sister Deborah Frankin also mentions all of her suitors driving “Hondas, KIAs, and Fords”; cars normally thought to be middle class and not typically associated with the wealthy.

In what other instances are socioeconomics meant to be present in “How to Rob a Bank”? Are these details deliberately put into “How to Rob a Bank” in order to classify Ted, Lizzie, and Deborah as lower class? If so, is it problematic that that should be the case? What does it do to the narrative of “How to Rob a Bank”? If not, why are those details put into “How to Rob a Bank”?

How “Bury Me, My Love” uses a messaging system to create immersion

anon

In “Bury Me, My Love”, the developers make use of a familiar text messaging system which contributes to the immersion of the game. The main way that the game does this is by creating a realistic interface and experience.

Immersion is an idea that is heavily discussed in my game development course. Immersion is what makes the player feel most engaged with the game. For this game, the interface is the most important feature in achieving immersion.

The developers create a messaging system that imitates what all humans know as text messaging. This messaging has everything, the “…” when the other person is typing, emojis, reply and send buttons, “read” symbols, and time stamps. The messages even address autocorrect as seen when Nour tries to send a message saying “don’t be so flippant with me” but flippant autocorrects to flip-flop. These are all features that the general audience can relate to because they experience these same features every day. Additionally, the message grammar is closely related to that which the general audience is used to using. For example, texts are informal, short, and longer messages are separated into multiple messages. Also, the overall interface of the messaging app looks just like an android/iOS one. Lastly, giving the player the option to sometimes choose what messages to send to Nour contributes to the immersion of the game.

All of these features of the messaging system make the player feel more engaged and immersed in the game. This is due to how closely related the game’s interface is to what the player is used to. The messages imitating what real-world texts look like makes the experience that much more realistic and keeps the reader engaged because they feel like they are Majd.

Personal data privacy and it’s vulnerability

anon

The modern internet has created ways of sharing ideas and works for people around the world. Such an effect seems extremely advantageous; however, it can be taken advantage of. When reading Chapter 6 of Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, I immediately began to think of a documentary that my class watched in Writing 101 last semester. This documentary was The Great Hack and focused on the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal that derived from the 2016 election. Basically, Cambridge Analytica gathered large amounts of personal data to target users in a personal manner to affect the US and UK elections. This scandal rose the question about who should have access to and ownership of personal data. Should the data created by users on the Internet be private and not available for sell? Many of the works that Rettberg discusses in Chapter 6 highlight how giant corporations take advantage of personal data for their own personal gain. For example, TrackMeNot by Daniel Howe and Helen Nissenbaum tries to disrupt this tactic by Google by confusing Google’s ad suggestions based on personal data. This is done by sending random search queries which affected what Google would advertise to you. Ads are just one of the ways that corporations and other entities use personal data. It can be used in disinformation campaigns to target social media users who are more susceptible to believe such false narratives. Due to the negatives that can come from personal data being released to entities with bad intentions, more needs to be done to protect one’s personal data rights. The question is how would this be done, through legislation? I ask this because it is doubtful that the corporations taking advantage of the data would enforce such protections without legislation.

Grappling with the Finite in a Time of Pandemic

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.

Analyzing Effects of Network Effect

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?

Originality and Authorship in Regenerated Text and Combinatory Poetics

anon

In Electronic Literature by Scott Rettberg, regenerated and mutated existing texts are discussed by Rettberg (Rettberg 49). He highlights Nick Montfort and Stephanie Strickland’s Sea and Spar Between. This piece is made up of words exclusively from poems of Emily Dickinson and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Since this piece is created from words that were used in specific texts, it raises the question, is Montfort’s piece completely original. Additionally, are the makers of combinatory poetics considered authors?

The originality question is one I believe is easy to answer. Due to Sea and Spar Between rearranging the words from the previously existing texts into original structures, the piece is original. It is not like the creators of the piece copied long strings of the text together to copy the original texts’ intentions. Thus, the intention of the authors is different than that of the creators of Sea and Spar Between.

Authorship relating to the creation of combinatory poetics is an issue we have discussed in class. I think the authorship question comes down to intention, just like for originality. In combinatory poetics, the resulting pieces usually have so many varying permutations that the creator cannot intend for all of them to be a specific way. This is an issue that occurs with bots. For example, Dr. Sample made one of the bots that were shown in class on Friday. One of the issues with the bot was that it produced unintended outputs such as offensive language. This is not an issue an “author” runs into. Everything an author intends for a piece to be is what is produced in the final product. Pieces that are authored are static whereas combinatory poetics are dynamic. Therefore, I believe people who develop combinatory poetics should be regarded more so as creators rather than authors because of the unintended results that can be produced in pieces.