[net]textualities › a blog of sorts

A quilt of testimonies about the impact of technology on writing is being built at trAce as it celebrates its tenth anniversary.

From the trAce newsletter:

In the last ten years there has been an explosion of new technology, especially related to computers and the internet, and for some of us it has changed forever the way we live and write. As the trAce Online Writing Centre reaches its tenth anniversary, we invite you to reflect on your own personal decade of living and writing with technology. At the beginning of the project the quilt will be empty, awaiting contributions. But as time passes, it will gradually expand; weaving together the differing perspectives of authors from across the globe.

The quilt can be viewed at http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/decade/submissions.cfm

My own contribution is found here: http://trace.ntu.ac.uk/decade/contribution.cfm?reader=36

response (0) | filed under: the new screen :: net.textuality

In 1999, William H. Gass wrote in his “In Defense of the Book” that readers of books will become increasingly better readers as the net would be the end to ‘good’ reading. He also regretted the loss of browsing in the sense that you can browse the book shelves in a library and, by serendipity, find what you never would have looked for in the first place.

At the time I disagreed with him, I found browsing the net a series of serendipitous events - I discovered many texts I never would have come across otherwise - and I still basically do disagree. Yet today, I can see his point as the web interfaces increasingly are made for targeted clicking at the pace of the development of corporate industrial standard. The user is only made to focus / focused on finding a piece of information. What once promised to be the evolvement of some kind of hypertextual consciousness has today regressed into targeted infomania. This is also the point when reading stops.

response (0) | filed under: the new screen :: net architecture :: information or knowledge? :: net.textuality

When Barthes proclaimed the death of the author back in the 60s, it was not the writer he meant but the author as organizing principle of a body of work. Not much has changed up till today. It is still the author as authority and origin around which we talk about the work of a writer.

A web site, though, challenges this construct. It is here not the writer who is on central stage, but the site and the very interface. The web site becomes the organizing principle that undercuts every claim to authority and origin, and the works themselves are located / written at the site of the Other rather than (the intentional ego of) the writer. Can we ever talk about authority, intent, origin, when talking about the web? Could we ever? Isn’t it all a myth, as Barthes claimed long ago, and a myth we have outlived today?

response (0) | filed under: the new screen :: net.textuality