A previous post by Natwwal touched on some of the thoughts I've been having about electronic literature and about the works we have read. I too enjoyed the reader-friendly interaction with "Disappearing Rain" despite being disappointed with the jumbled and sometimes bad writing, especially in the "River Journeys" half. The main distinction that I think has been bugging a bunch of us is the focus of several of the other hypertexts on the media and the form rather than content. "Afternoon" and "Lexia to Perplexia" and even the description of "Humument" in Hayles piece lead me to think that the authors are far more concerned with the effect of the interaction the reader has with the interface and the medium than with the actual story (if there is one).

Was anyone else a little bothered by some of the discussion in Landow about the possible future irrelevance of books and other printed material as important? Perhaps it's that I love to read by the fire at the remote family cabin, that my mom's a librarian, or that I simply have an attachment to the status quo, but I feel almost morally opposed to reading without a book. I certainly am attached to the "tactility" Landow mentions. I was relieved at Landow's view of escaping the confinement of print: "This common project first requires that one first recognize the enormous power of the book, for only after we have made ourselves conscious of the ways it has formed and informed our lives can we seek to pry ourselves free of some of its limitations" (46-7).

Tophat1, Oz, and Magoo have already had a discussion concerning the nature of Armstrong's thesis and the relationship between the novel and realism. I, however, was much more bothered by Armstrong's notion later on in that paragraph about the modern subject: "Once formulated in fiction, however, this subject proved uniquely capable of reproducing itself not only in authors but also in readers, in other novels, and across British culture in law, medicine, moral and political philosophy..." and then "To produce an individual, novels had to think as if there already were one, that such an individual was not only the narrating subject and source of writing but also the object of narration and referent of writing" (3). What if there already was such thing as an individual? Someone please correct me if I'm missing the point, but I feel that there is a problem with causation here. I read the whole thing and can find nowhere in which Armstrong shows that the concept of individualism was not simply a manifestation of society that the novel has mirrored.

On NPR the other day was a discussion concerning the relative benefits/disadvantages to literacy of so many people being online, blogging, online-journaling, etc. One side contended that the quality of writing and information is often so poor that it leads to a degradation in correct usage of the English language. They cited instances of online shorthand ("c u l8er") and the limited credibility of information one can run into. The other side of it is that, for some people, reading and writing of any kind is going to help develop literacy.

It seems to me that it really comes down to who it is that's using the internet. People who don't have many opportunities in school or who are not brought up reading and writing may need the kind of exposure to text the internet can provide. My girlfriend complains all the time about growing up in a small town in Louisiana where she went to the best high school and graduates of it still are not sure that "tough" and "somewhat" are in fact words in the English language. So from her point of view, it would help so much for everyone to simply be given the chance to read in any way.

As I read Bolter and Grusin, I couldn't stop thinking about other movies they didn't mention, specifically Tron, Johnny Mnemonic, and The Matrix. All these seem to parallel perfectly Bolter and Grusin's arguments concerning our continued strive toward emcompassing reality through digital expression. Our desire for immediacy in these films is satisfied by the actual immersion of a person or people inside the digital medium and the near-complete escape from the difficulties of the real world through advanced virtual reality.

I can't think of any passage within the reading, however, in which they offer a psychological explanation for why we desire immediacy and a false reality that is as close to "real" as possible. I keep wondering what it is that draws us to The Matrix in the sense of virtual reality. It certainly expresses the ultimate in immediacy, in which the medium is completely erased from our perspective.

Despite a whole chapter dedicated to the concepts of "hot" and "cool," I'm left with a sense of conflict that's a straight result from his examples. I feel like "hot" sometimes means "inflamatory" and sometimes means "full of information." There's no substance to his use of radio as "hot" media and TV as "cool" media. I came out of reading the chapter frustrated because I had no idea about whether or not a blog is hot or cool or sometimes one or the other depending on form and content. Something is missing here. And what is this reading itself? There are simply too many paradoxes inherent in his argument for me to take it too seriously.

I feel like a tool being the one to bring up Facebook, but I just can’t help laughing at the irony that the same day I start my first blog, the format on Facebook changes to the “News Feed” and “Mini-Feed” that seems to constitute a sort of forced community blog (as well as less privacy – note the new group: “Facebook is now creepy”). Twice in a day I become a part of a blog that I probably would not have been involved in if left to my own devices and desires. In looking around a little more, I just learned about the 'Notes' feature on Facebook which essentially means a blog for everyone, making the site a strange aggregation of blogs. But I can't quite decide if Facebook itself is a glorified blog, or if it's just an agent of blogging.