People seem curious to read about private lives in order to reflect upon their own lives; it seems that readers do not want to know this information about the author in order to understand his work better, but rather to understand themselves better. While the increasing attention for the author scares critics, who believe that the approach of the 'autonomous work' is the only possible way to value literature on its own merits, I am convinced that literature does not need to be protected from bad influences. In fact, literature that seemed almost forgotten, or studied only by academics, is finding a new readership through new media. Tolstoy and Faulkner, for example, were suddenly popular, because their novels were selected for Oprah’s Book Club, which took care to portray the background of the authors on its website. Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway (1925) also recently gained an unexpected new readership, because of the release of the film The Hours (Stephen Daldry, 2002), which is partly about Woolf’s life. This is the way literature survives through, in, and via new media, and finds new readers in truly unexpected ways.
Jannah Loontjens is a writer and poet.
36. Consume Without a Screen – Alessandro Ludovico
Since the arrival of electronic media, visionaries have speculated on ways to expand our physiological reading limits beyond the constraints of print, in order to absorb, through a sort of cultural osmosis, huge quantities of information in a fraction of time. They foresaw what we now call digital technology, though originally imagined as much more powerful than today’s fare and often involving the body as primary interface. In line with their predictions, since the early 1990s we've expanded reading space almost ad infinitum through global networks of hypertexts. Now we're back again, considering the book the perfectly sized medium with a universal 'interface'. In fact, after twenty years of re-inventing the wheel, through multiple and unnatural combinations of icons, graphic and animations, contemporary e-reading interfaces resemble the most effective one yet: print.
Our desire for rich digital content on the go has yielded varieties of fast, precise tools that digitize print at will. We have more software options to make online text (often lost in graphical enhancements and ads) that look and feel like paper. Attempts to incorporate 'digital' elements in print have also generated various hybrids, such as POD (print-on-demand) files that can be updated every second. Digital and print, while two different worlds, are in no way mutually exclusive; they attract, repulse, and sometimes complement each other. Nevertheless our senses are still not trained for hypertexts and hybrids. Lost in too much information, we are distracted by the ability to search ad infinitum, floating in a limbo of minimal concentration. The finite space of a book becomes reassuring with its limits, its focus on un-linkable topics.
If the digital expands our possibilities and access to content, print is still the preferred medium for preservation. The 'convergence' of different media into a paradise ruled by some omnipotent digital god resounds once more like empty propaganda. The ruling classic interfaces operate alongside digitally specific platforms in a desperate attempt to establish a digital standard for print, as was accomplished for music and video. Once established, this standard will likely escalate our taste for and consumption of editorial products, with unpredictable social consequences. But print will not disappear. On the contrary, whether cheap last-minute up-to-date printouts or more expensive, limited editions, the printed medium is simply mutating as a physically enjoyable form and a future luxury: consume without a screen.
Alessandro Ludovico is a media critic, editor-in-chief of Neural magazine, and founder of Mag.net (Electronic Cultural Publishers organization).
37. The Networked Culture Machine – Peter Lunenfeld
The growth of blogs, Twitter, and Facebook considered in tandem with Tumblr and other social softwares that enable posting and tagging accounts, creates an environment of 'continuous partial production.' As ninety-nine percent of everything ever made is either purely for personal consumption, largely forgettable, or just plain junk, continuous partial production is not a huge problem. What does become problematic is when the new affordances make the old content untenable in the emerging environments.
Acknowledging that there are losses that follow every gain in technological capacity is not the same as blindly following the reporting cycle. The key issue is that our twenty-first-century cultural machines lead to a previously unimaginable level of object differentiation and information richness. The networked culture machine’s combination of embedded technology and just-in-time production make possible a novel hybrid intellectuality. Text can be linked to graphics, photos, and moving images in fluid ways impossible a generation ago. The combinatory possibilities of alphanumeric texts, still and moving images, aural components from music to spoken word, and even contextual environmental embedding, all of these simulations of other media offer a huge set of affordances for both the creation and reception of meaning. The sheer density of information and materiality of the contemporary moment is unrivaled in history.
Peter Lunenfeld, Professor in the Design Media Arts Department at UCLA. He is the creator and editorial director of the MIT Press Mediawork project.
This text is adapted from The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine, MIT Press, 2011.
38. From Noun to Verb – Ellen Lupton
Over forty years ago, the author was brutally slain in the streets of Paris . It was 1968. The times were dark; the turtlenecks were darker. Young people stormed the gates of the academy and upended the author’s role as originator and legislator of meaning. Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Jacques Derrida pissed proudly into burning heaps of doctoral dissertations that had once claimed to ground the true meaning of written texts in the inner lives of writers. The author was dead; the reader was born. The new generation exposed the text as an open web of connections whose meaning lay at the mercy of history and context, reception, and appropriation.
What status does 'the author' and 'the reader' hold today? The vocabulary of SMS has upgraded 'text' from noun (inert object) to verb (electrified action). The telephone, invented to deliver the living human voice, is now used for writing more than talking. Along the way, text lapsed into the informality of speech, entering an age of stunning laxity.
Algorithms have become authors, too. Welcome to the world of 'black hat' search engine optimization, which uses automatically generated content to trick Google into sending extra clicks to dubious websites. Phrases like 'cloaking', 'auto blogging', and 'content farming' are part of a new wild west of un-authored content. One piece of software translates texts from English into German and then back into English, scrambling the vocabulary and grammar of the input to ensure a seemingly original output, immune to accusations of plagiarism. Behold the rebirth of the author.