4 New Technologies and New Literatures

Md. Intaj Ali

Introduction

This is the age of Digital Humanities and Information Technology. New technologies are continuously changing and evolving thereby replacing older versions. Similarly, “new” literatures are too evolving with their own impacts on science and technology. Although such rapid transformation and changes can create problematic situations, they, nevertheless, create wonderful transmutations of knowledge and literature by integrating technology with literature, culture, art and society.

In this module, I argue that new technologies of contemporary world play important roles in creating, circulating and determining the so called position and reception of “New” Literatures. How will we understand the relationship of Literature and Technology in this 21st Century, how does technological innovation have an impact on the forms of literature and how does literature maintain pace with such evolving new technologies have also been discussed in this chapter.

Alex Goody in his “Introduction: The Twentieth-century Technological Imaginary” (in Goody, Technology, Literature and Culture, 2011) states: “Technology is a key defining factor in twentieth-century culture. From the early Fordist revolution in manufacturing to computers and the internet, technology has reconfigured our relationship to ourselves, each other and to the tools and the materials we use.”

We have seen rapid changes in the field of media technologies and textual technologies in literature. When we hear the word “technology,” we think of computers or smart phones or some related technological devices. We seldom think of something related to letters, the alphabet or the book or the printing press all of which were the results of technological advancement in history.

So far as literature is concerned, it is also subject to evolution in terms of textual technologies and new media technologies from moveable type to the stream press to the age of digital print media. These gradual transformations and innovations shape our understanding of texts and reading and textual interpretation. Traditional print-based humanities are moving towards the digital space where everything is digitally born (and, incidentally, it is more eco-friendly).

N. Katherine Hayles and Jessica Pressman in their introduction to “Making , Critique: A Media Framework” pointed out that “As John Cayley (2002) and Jay David Bolter (2001) remind us, writing surfaces have always been complex, reaching beyond the surface deep into the surrounding culture. Yet when writing was accomplished by a quill pen, ink pot, and paper, it was possible to fantasize that writing was simple and straightforward, a means by which the writer’s thoughts could be transferred more or less directly into the reader’s mind. With the proliferation of technical media in the latter half of the nineteenth century, that illusion became much more difficult to sustain, for intervening between writer and reader was proliferating array of technical devices, including telegraphs, phonographs, typewriters, Dictaphones, Teletypes and wire recorders, on up to digital computing devices that themselves are splitting into an astonishing array of different protocols, functionalities, interfaces and codes. The deepening complexities of the media landscape have made mediality, in all its forms, a central concern of the twenty first century. With that changed cultural emphasis comes a reawakening of interest in the complexities of earlier media forms as well.

The Role of Digital Humanities:

Stephen Ramsay,while defining Digital Humanities,states: “the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas.”ii The digital humanities affect the scholarship of new literature and the strategy of reading practice. Mostly there are more digital readers now and ‘distant reading’ is more popular in literary reading society.

Adam Kirsch’s essay “Technology Is Taking over English Departments” projects the crisis of humanities as a discipline and welcome the next big thing ‘digital humanities’ which is going to exist in a long run.

Brandon Vogt defines new media as something which “commonly refers to content available on- demand through the Internet, accessible on any digital device, usually containing interactive user feedback and creative participation. Common examples of new media include websites such as online newspapers, blogs, wikis, video games and social media. A defining characteristic of new media is dialogue. New Media transmit content through connection and conversation. It enables people around the world to share, comment on, and discuss a wide variety of topics. Unlike any of past technologies, New Media is grounded on an interactive community.”

Digital Media and Digital Space are the two common factors working in building the formats of literature and in expanding its horizon in the age of Digital Humanities. Digital Humanities is particularly creating a mixed space of technology and culture by using digital media with its various avenues.

Electronic Literature:

Literature is now beyond Text, Ink and Paper in the age of electronic literature. It is being produced in different formats and media. The most popular forms include blogs, websites, audio and hypermedia texts and much more. Digital space and digital media play a complementary role in making the production of literature, some may argue, more democratic in comparison to print literature.

N. Katherine Hayles defines electronic literature as texts that have been digitally created (“digital born”). Print literature that has simply been digitized is not considered digital literature. Only texts that originated on a computer and are intended to be read on one (including all the genres of print literature as well as genres exclusive to interactive environments) are considered digital literature. The Electronic Literature Organization has come up with another definition that encompasses printed works whose creation is dependent on computing technology.The ELO definition reads as follows: “The term refers to work with an important literary aspect that takes advantage of the capabilities and contexts provided by the stand-alone or networked computer.” According to the ELO, the role that the computer plays in the process of creating the text is very important and offers many conceptual, visual, aural and interactive opportunities. However, reading and writing still play an essential role in digital literature (Electronic Literature Organization). Interestingly, Hayles makes the distinction between “classical” (mainly recognizable through blocks of texts (lexia) and a limited palette of visual and aural effects, heavily relying on hypertext links) and contemporary/-postmodern (which make more use of new technological possibilities) works of electronic literature. She also notes that this distinction is not intended to be demeaning to the former, but rather serves as a notion for different aesthetics. Hypertext fiction is evolving in many hybrid genres as well, including but not limited to “network fiction,” “interactive fiction,” “locative narratives,” “interactive drama,” and “generative art”.

The term literatronica, A.K.A. literatronic (Marino, 2006), was coined by Colombian mathematician and author Juan B Gutierrez (2002) to refer to electronic literature. According to Gutierrez (2006):

“A word that describes digital narrative, that is, narrative designed for the computer, is literatronic. It comes from the Latin word litera -letter- and the Greek word which gave birth to the word electricity, electron -Amber. Literatronic means letter that requires electricity, or by extension, letter that requires a computer. Literatronic works could not be reproduced on paper except, perhaps, as a reading path at a given moment.

Literatronic is a dynamic hypertext authoring system which, instead of relying solely on static hypertext links (for the system allows these as well), uses an Artificial Intelligence engine to recommend the 3 best next lexias based on what you have already read.

However, Electronic literature invites us to go beyond books, ink and paper; to transcend mediums and screens and enter into the texts.viii There is another form of literature which came into existence as a movement in the United States of America around 2010 as Alternative Literature, or Alt Lit. Alt Lit is a group of young writers tied together by their extremely active use of internet and social media. It is published and circulated on the internet and social media and it is written in the native styles of the internet and social media. It is largely concerned with life on the internet and social media. (Adam Hammond, 2016, 142). Alternative Literature is being produced and circulated through freely accessible online blogs, social media and sometimes personal websites.

Case Study

For case study of new technologies and new literature I will cite the example of ground breaking work of “Project Bichitra”ix, an electronic variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s writings, implemented by the School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University. The Bichitrax Tagore Online Variorum Project was sanctioned by the Government of India as part of its programme for the celebration of Rabindranath Tagore’s 150th birth anniversary. It has been fully funded by the Ministry of Culture, Government of India. Bichitra is the biggest integrated knowledge site devoted to any author in any language to date. It comprises most versions of nearly all Rabindranath’s works in Bengali and English. It excludes most of the letters, speeches, textbooks and translations, except Tagore’s translations from his own Bengali. The project was co-ordinated by Prof. Sukanta Chaudhuri, Prof. Subha Chakraborty Dasgupta & Prof. Samantak Das.

The prominent example of Audio as literature can be seen in the following link- http://shobdokolpodrum.in/. They publish all genres of literature in audio format.

Reading Practice 

Reading, in this networked society of 21st century, is no longer confined to the print forms. The scope of the reading has extended to the Internet sources that changed the traditional reading culture of the readers. The emergence of the Internet has brought an extraordinary change in the reading culture. It has made its presence felt in a big way as far as the reading behaviour of the people is concerned. Presently, reading is no longer confined to the print reading. The range of access to the reading sources has changed drastically due to the Internet revolution and now includes web sites, web pages, e-books, e-journals, e-papers, e-mail, discussion boards, chat rooms, instant messaging, blogs, wikis, and other multimedia documents.

The practice of reading also has changed over the time due to the advancement of technology and drastic shift in readers’ choices and habits. Electronic reading is more useful and comfortable for the new age readers. So the readers are using the reading devices like kindle (of Amazon) or iPod (of Apple) which is more user-friendly and cheaper from the printed book. The hypertext and hypermedia technologies help to cultivate more interest among the e-readers by making the process of reading more interactive and more operational from the digital reader’s point of view.

S.D.Elizabeth, in her essay Reading on the Internet: The link between literacy and technology, says that Internet readers are reading expository text in a hypertext format where the ideas are connected by links, headings, icons and graphics.xii The Impact of Internet on reading habits is more effective because of its speed and efficiency.

Conclusion

There is hardly any doubt over the fact that science and technology have profoundly affected the production and reception of literature. Technology is a major player in this connection. There is a great fear pertaining to the wider impact of technology on written literature. The question, which is being asked, is: why we should continue with the current form of literature. Rapidly growing influence of technology has altered the way in which we live and think. The cultural, social, and economic life of man has drastically changed.

In the world of digital self-publication writers have the freedom and choices of publishing in different social and digital Media. Although the ideas of Barthes and Foucault were widely circulated and vigorously debated in their own time, like those of Mcluhan, they have now acquired a new relevance with the advent of the digital medium. Mark Poster, heralding Barthes’s and Foucault’s “anticipation of digital authorship” in “What’s the Matter with the Internet ? (2001)”, argues that the shift to digital textuality “elicits a rearticulation of the author from the center of the text to its margins, from the source of meaning to an offering, a point in a sequence of a continuously transformed matrix of signification.” 

New technologies, their expansion and constant integration into literature interpolate readers and authors to reconsider their roles and their possibilities. It has not been defined yet what literature will do and be in the years to come.xv There is a great debate in this particular field .Do we need to redefine the concept of literature now? How does this digital revolution impact on the concept of literature? These questions can be answered if we try to understand the following words of Edgar Allan Poe ‘The ultimate purpose of art is to produce continuously novel effects’.xvi Are we getting these effects or not? That is more important.

Reference

• Goody, Alex. Technology, Literature and Culture, Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011.
• Hammond, Adam. Literature in the Digital Age: An Introduction (Cambridge Introductions to Lit),Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016.
• Mark L. Greenberg, ed. and Lance Middle Schachterle, ed., Literature and Technology, Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1992.
• Webb Allen, and Rozema Robert, Literature and the Web Reading and Responding with New Technologies, Portsmouth: Heinemann, 2008.