Waaaaay back in the beginning of the semester, I posted something about how blogging wasn’t for perfectionists, because it thrives on a kind of spontaneity that is in tension with the planning and revision that perfectionists need.

Reading (browsing? surfing? floating in?) GAM3R 7H30RY, I felt a similar tension—between linear and nonlinear modes of reading. In GAM3R 7H30RY, you read the text itself, on those digital index card-looking things, and then you have a choice about whether or not to read the comments. Now, it seems that the comments are often the most interesting part of the text, so you really shouldn’t skip them. On the other hand, the importance of the comments doesn’t seem to lessen the value of Wark’s text, because without the original text, the comments wouldn’t exist. So although there certainly is some sensation of the linear, of accomplishing something, of moving progressively forward as you advance from card to card, this sensation is undercut by the “digression” (into the most important part of the text) that is required when we choose to read the comments.

I have seen Sherry Turkle sited in many, many texts I've read and so I decided to see what all the fuss is about. I began leafing through her novel, "Life on the Screen," and I came across an interesting section on identity on the Internet called "Aspects of the Self." In it, she puts forth a few different psychoanalytic theories (from Freud, Jung, and Lacan) and speaks about their relevance to online identity. She begins by stating how Freud proposed a decentered view of the self (ego, id, etc) and then how Lacan moved forward with this idea to "join psychoanalysis to the postmodern attempt to potray the self as a relam of discourse rather than as a real thing or a permanent structure of mind." For Lacan, "the complex chains of associations that constitute meaning for each individual lead to no final endpoint or core self." Turkle believes that online phenomena (for example, online dating) represents this cycling through of different dimensions or lines of self.

I have once again managed to run off on a tangent while reading for my final, critical project. This time, I've been reading "Radiant Textuality" by Jerome McGann. In it, he addresses some traditional perspectives on printed text. He talks about Mallarme's book, written about 100 years ago, about "the culture of the book." McGann says that in it, Mallarme rejects the idea of a book as a simple container for information. Instead Mallarme (there's an accent on the last "e")uses the book to mimic the structure of a musical score and the rhythmn of a poem. I liked the following sentence from McGann: "The Mallarmean book comes forth as a set of figurations behaving like sentient and purposive creatures, constituting and calling forth their world(s), which include all of the book's readers, living and dead, actual, possible, imaginary" (210).

As we read and experience sites such as Jemma and onlinecaroline and as we use the internet for the millions of other things it offers, it can be interesting to take a step back and review our situation through texts such as the one I am currently reading. It is called "The Body and the Screen" by Michele White. In the book, White explores the different ways that we experience the the computer, each other, and, most importantly, ourselves as we sit in front of the screen. I am most interested, and am working on a final project on, our experience of ourselves and the formation of our individuality as it occurs when we are online.

Growing up, I could walk exactly one block from my house to the public library. I could walk in, find the fiction section, and walk through the stacks looking at each book, neatly labeled with a sticker indicating its genre (mystery, romance, etc). Now, I realize not every library has the sticker system, but, when we go to the bookstore or library, we can easily see pertinent information (author, title, genre, summary) almost immediately. We get this information, pretty much whether we like it or not, before we even read the book.

On the other hand, when we come across hypertexts, cyberdramas, and the like, the piece's information by which it can be catalogued is not as obvious. We may have to search for a special link that displays relevant information (like author and site information).

At the end of her piece, "From Game-Story to Cyberdrama," Janet Murray calls for us to rethink how we approach the new genre she dubs "cyberdrama." Instead of comparing the different aspects of the cyber-drama to the standards for either games or stories, she believes we ought to think about how we might make a better cyberdrama. It occured to me that, if this is in fact possible, it may also be a good way to get out of the frustration that comes in our attempts to evaluate electronic literature and the recurring tendency to campare it with printed literature. Of course, I think Murray may go a little too far in suggesting that we cannot accept any comparisons of a new genre with other genres it may have as its foundation. In thinking about new forms of story-telling it may be wise to heed her word to evaluate and perpetuate them on their own merits yet it may also be that we can't help but compare them to their predecessors.

I recently came across an article on Jstor called "Representing and Interpreting Literature by Computer" by David D Miall. In his opening discussion of how online literature may change the reader's experience of literature, he states: "...it is perhaps imprudent to speculate about changes in such a fundamental human activity as reading when we know so little about how we have accomodated to conventional printed materials over the last several hundred years." Miall goes on to discuss how the reading activities that take place with a book are not yet readily available on the computer.
His comments indirectly stimulated a line of thought about the history of the printed book and how this long tradition will hold up as it faces online literature.