I am at the computers and writing conference in Athens, GA, and Jay Bolter is about to begin his keynote talk titled "Open Writing Spaces: Inscription and Technology." Below are some main points and some thoughts on them, as they happen...
Before now
- the "heyday of hypertext" seems to be over. the change of what counts as writing and the change in the spaces in which we are writing... the notion of wiring now includes multimedia
- the spaces of writing are opening up, and some of them do not look like writing at all
- writing is hybrid and mobile
the argument used to be that hypertext could be a form of literature and h/text was positioned as an avant-garde of literary movement. it also, of course, "problematized the role of the author."
the literary hypertext movement has failed because it was attached and supplanted by "traditional" literature. the freedom from the author is "contradictory" to the very literary experience, according to critics.
Now
despite the electronic editions, etc., very little has changed in the form of printed books, you'd think that the Internet did not exist if you look at the books being published.
computer games have changed things a bit. Bogust: games are a procedural rhetoric, a way to make claims about "how things work."
examples: September 12. a rhetorical game about the war on terror. has a political position embodied in the game, and you activate that political position by playing the game.
are these games a new kind of writing:
traditional literati think "no."
the writing community has traditional been more open to innovation than the literary community.
Virtual Reality has been replaced by "Augmented reality."
he is focusing now on development of AR experiences for informal education, entertainment, and cultural expression.
a step towards the Holodeck: Facade
an "immersive drama", then there was AR Facade
so, basically, he considers these things writing and composing, although they do not use "written text" in the strictest sense of the word. They are immersive and interactive
this is cool: Oakland cemetery with the audio of the "voices" of the people buried there. they want people to wear a backpack with GPS so that an appropriate audio clip will be played when they get to a certain place.
what would this be good for:
- writing assignment exploring geographies and histories
- community histories, etc.
- add the responses of the users to the original narrative
- location-based audio--use map mashups!
use on historical and cultural sites, suggested by the students themselves.
another example: poems about subway stations in Atlanta when users will hear these poems as they come to a certain station.
We are living through a paradigm shift where we begin to think about reality as not only virtual, but as grounded in physical reality augmented by virtual stuff: think Second Life and MMOGs.
these technologies tie in virtual environments with the communities of practice.
SL: hacked SL to put avatars into physical environments: one thing you do with this is new forms of collaboration.
remediation of lost films in SL.
this is all very far from "traditional" writing, but this is still "inscription" and creativity.
social computing and mobile computing is the second half of the paradigm shift.
the internet is not an abstract cyberspace, but is rather an integration with real life. so, there are these hybrid combinations of the electronic and of the "real."
the social dimension of this is much more important that matters of form, which was the case with the previous attempt at "hypertextualizing" literature.
the community is building its inscriptional practices together (wikipedia). there are limitations, though: these new spaces are not necessarily congenial to all traditional forms of writing. so, its not about the death of the old genres, but rather about the multiplicity of forms that is there now.
