Literate Existence in the Digital Space. Contemporary Traces of Identity (original) (raw)
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Preguntas por la literatura en la era digital. Una introducción
Virtualis, 2018
This introduction is dedicated to some of the fundamental inquiries for the production of the present volume of Virtualis : Questions for literature in the digital age . In the present time, sometimes marked by the reduction of literature to a brand of the culture, our starting point is the discussion about the meaning and the literariness of the literary. From this, new topics of discussion arise, such as the emergence of new objects of study and new theoretical-critical frameworks for literary studies, among others. Both of them are part of the new ways of reading in the digital age.
Visual Worlds: The Aesthetics and Politics of Affect. (eds.) Isabelle Boof-Vermesse, Kornelia Slavova, Elena Dineva. Sofia: Polis Press, 2018. 136-144. ISBN: 978-954-796-066-4.
Building on my previous studies of the origin and nature of electronic literature from the late 1990s onwards from the perspective of the philosophy of technology and the two strands of posthumanism: the technocentric and anthropocentric ones, as I have termed them,1 here I aim to examine the 'reverse' development in the field of fiction. How has digital technology affected the printed book? Clearly, digitality – of which visuality is only one aspect, often perceived as the dominant one – has emerged as the central feature not only of electronic literature, but lies at the core of contemporary printed literature as well. As N. Katherine Hayles claims in her paper, " What is Literature? " published in the New Literary History, " Literature in the twenty-first century is computational " (2007: 99). This is certainly true for electronic literature, which is " digital born, created on a computer and meant to be read on it " (Hayles 2007: 99). The digital medium has become intrinsic to print literature as well and has opened new opportunities for exploration and experimentation. This paper looks at recent visual experimentation in print, which draws on the digital, and leads to playing around with the materiality of the text. This development has led to a further foregrounding of the physical and fictional nature of printed texts in ways that are both original and reminiscent of the modernist experiments with language as a material object: both aurally and visually, in terms of layout and typography, as carried out, for example, by Gertrude Stein, Edward Cummings and many others. Though there is an established tradition of examining electronic literature as an offshoot of postmodern writing and as a validation of all the major tenets of literary postmodernism, it is not by chance that the avant-garde aesthetic practices of electronic literature and print literature in the 21 st century have been interpreted even in quite recent studies as conjoined to the modernist period, for instance in Digital Modernism by Jessica Pressman (2014). Today there is an abundance of literary texts, which merge textuality with technology in hybrids of the verbal and the visual mode by employing the creative potential of the digital medium.
New Types of Writing Developed Via New Media
2017
In this study, new types of writing that emerged with new media after 2000s will be discussed. Since the second half of the twentieth century, there have been rapid developments in mass media with transistor television and radio. From the eighties, with the progress and expansion of computer and the internet world and the increasing individualization of communication tools, it seems that the people's participation in sharing increases. As it is known, it started to be written and printed much more in the electronic media which appeared in 2000s and which developed very fast and especially in network environments. Blog writing, social media, chat rooms and so on can be just a few examples. Thanks to Android systems, mobile applications have emerged as well as many applications expected from a computer in a purely mobile environment and the computers have become comparable. Application, and shortly called Apps, offers many conveniences and innovations in almost every area and as an alternative to social sharing sites on the internet, WhatsApp chat / messaging application has emerged. This means that social networking networks are moved to mobile phones, which means that people cannot live without their mobile phones. All these technological developments have started to be used in education. In the context of this study, it will be mentioned about new and emerging types of writing and reading in terms of writing and reading activities we have discussed above. This includes apps that include a variety of writing and reading activities will be mentioned. In this frame, the literary-social movement named "Poem in Street" in the world of writing will be mentioned and the controversy of poetry will be discussed through the examples of rebirth in the new era. The basic viewpoint in this study is the new writing and reading activities and the emergence of a new understanding of literature or the reflections of technological developments to the world of literature and the readers. Keywords: Writing, reading and writing, the Internet, mobile applications, new media. 1.Introduction We live in a time when mass media, which we call new media, are highly diversified and technologies are developing very much. Therefore, all these technological tools, which have become very effective in almost every area of life, have entered the world of materials, culture, arts and literature and are also used very effectively. The most striking and up-to-date examples of this are the smartphone, PC-tablet, Android, iPhone systems and applications that we can use through these systems. Diversifications can be seen in the applications (Apps) lately. They also have many forms that are used in the world of literature. The debate here is what is present as novelty in terms of writing. In fact, there is not much new development in the context of writing. It is technological tools and technological tools that are close to existing innovations. All of this is in the world of writing, storing, archiving and most importantly sharing. The concept of globalization is actually expanding directly to all these technological tools. As a matter of fact, it seems that the accessibility to the world of writing and the sharing of the writings seems to have become very easy. The innovation that needs to be emphasized here is the fact that new types of writing have emerged in the world of literature. The application of Wattpad (Free books-Wattpad) which is a free story, poem, novel etc. reading and publishing activity is becoming increasingly prevalent. This change process, which begins with electronic mail, continues today as text messages. The subject that will be discussed in this study is the general discussion of the literature world shared with new technologies. These developments in the world of literature have attracted attention of literature and naturally have been included in research fields and they have been subject as research object. In this context, it can be said that the methods of science, which is called as the name of literature, changed the methods and adapted itself to the age. Michael Hofmann (2006) for the field of literary science that includes such works as the concept of intercultural
Text and Image in the Digital Age – The Digital Revolution
Open Journal for Information Technology
The paper discusses the place and role played by the pictures and text in the digital era. The digital art has become an essential component of contemporary art and new tools currently available to artists are revolutionizing the way they think and create, and so, artistic projects that could not have been accomplished with traditional methods, are now possible through computer interfaces. The computers have facilitated the traditional processes, and also offered a whole new vision on the sketches and the idea forming process, allowing the artists to create many virtual versions of an artwork-a concept. In order to analyze the history of digital art, it is necessary to study the history of several disciplines: computer history as visual medium, the history of graphic design and computer history integrated in the visual arts. Often these disciplines coincide during certain periods, making the study even more difficult to conduct. This chapter presents a brief history of computer generated art, of deconstructive typography and the importance of information visualization. Some of the earliest known examples of computer-generated algorithmic art were created by artists such as George Nees, Frieder Nake, Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnar in the early 60's. As a conclusion, we emphasize the idea that artists should use the computer as a tool adapted to their will, but understanding its potential to host systems that might allow the creation of artwork or graphics. In this regard, the computer must be considered a generative tool with a potential that must be understood in the context of the artist's work and intentions.
Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, 2018
The recent digital-born electronic literature has heterogeneous components such as kinetic texts, kinetic images, graphical designs, sounds, and videos. These digital components are embedded with the main text as the paratext of print and digital works such as preface, author’s name, illustrations, and title. However, the comparative study between paratext and embedded paratext of electronic literature shows the different strategic patterns and functions of these entities. We discuss the conceptual framework of illuminant devices of paratexts and propose a new term technoeikon to recognize the functions of embedded literary artifact in digital literary works. We examine the critical construction of new term technoeikon which has a unique characteristic that makes electronic literary works different from print literature. This essay reviews the cyclical process of technoeikon from the historical perspective of pre-print culture and print culture and acknowledges technoeikon as inheri...
Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication (presentation pdf)
Digital Age in Semiotics and Communication, 2018
Before being the title of our new journal, Digital age in semiotics and communication was a short definition of the research program of the Southeast European Center for Semiotic Studies at the New Bulgarian University. Of course, today speaking of a “unified program” in the humanities is a utopian act, given the nature of our communities, the hyper-productivity of our colleagues, the orientation towards projects, a shortage of funding, and predatory open-access publishing. Digital age in semiotics and communication is the first specialized semiotic journal dedicated to the deep cultural transformations after the advent of the internet, and thus provides a platform for a long term collaboration with those fellow semioticians who intend to dedicate their research predominantly to such a topic. It is conceived as a platform for a kind of intellectual crowd sourcing for new semiotic ideas, adequate to new cultural realities, thus opening our discipline to the cultural agenda of the XXI century. The paper of Vuzharov “Personalization Algorithms – Limiting the Scope of Discovery? How algorithms force out serendipity” is about the major backstage processes behind the seductive services of Google and Facebook. The author keeps a strong ethical stance concerning the necessity for more awareness in this regard, and to make the point more clear uses the textual pragmatic model of Eco from The Limits of Interpretation (1992). The next two papers analyze new identity mechanisms emerged in digital culture. Andacht’s paper “The Imagined Community Revisited through a Mock-Nationalistic YouTube Web Series” is dedicated to a new and original form of video narrative, addressing the Uruguayan national identity in a totally different way compared to the nation formation described by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities (1983). The main theoretical concept of the British scholar is semiotically revised with the help of some Peircean terms. The paper of Lankauskaitė and Liubinienė “A Shift from ‘Me’ to ‘We’ in Social Media” examines the impact of the Web 3.0. on the mentality of internet users. The shift from ‘me’ to ‘we’ is seen as a consequence of technological innovations which allow crowdsourcing, participatory culture, collective intelligence, etc. The thesis is illustrated with three case studies of an online TV, an offline social action, initiated in social media and an online project for artistic collaboration. The next five papers are dedicated to various aesthetic and interactive practices in digital culture. In his paper “Postcard from Istanbul: Digital Reconstruction of the City as Memory in Tasos Boulmetis’s Polítiki Kouzína / A Touch of Spice / Baharatin Tadi”, Dimitriadis explicates the narrative mechanisms for representing the past with the help of digital effects. Contrary to the mainstream use of the digital special FX, in this case a strong poetic effect is achieved in visualizing the space of memory. Cassone dedicates his paper “’It’s over 9000.’ Apeiron Narrative Configurations in Contemporary Mediascape” to an interesting videogame phenomenon, started as a pen and paper role-playing game in Japan prior to the digital age. The particular narrative device of individual growth of power in the fictional discourse, after the transfer of the plot as a videogame, is analyzed with the tools of generative semiotics and is spread as a meme and viral phenomenon. Another paper is about “Constructing the Corporate Instagram Discourse – a critical visual discourse approach”. There Poulsen takes a critical stance towards an important incoherence in the way Instagram represents its mission, and at the same time how the app is trying to regulate the use of the platform and its visual tools. In his text “Formalism and Digital Research of Literature,” Debnar examines another phenomenon typical of the digital age - the mass digitalization of literary texts and the challenges for the reader in front of huge archives available for everybody. The key notion of his text, borrowed from Moretti, is distant reading, and the author’s contribution is to demonstrate the validity of the formalist approach to that theory. In “Enchanted Object: Indian Sari, Negotiating the Online and the Offline Space”, Khanwalkar makes a sociosemiotic analysis of a garment with huge symbolic value – the Sari. The main object of the research is how online discourse on the Sari upgrades and transforms its significance, how local and global interact in the identity formation process. In the next section there are two papers on the digital age in corporate communication. In “Engaging Brand Communication in Facebook – a Typology of the Brand Page Users”, Kartunova identifies four types of Facebook users of corporate pages using the classical approach of Jean-Marie Floch. The study is supported by empirical data, collected among the target groups and puts the main emphasis on brand culture adoption and brand narrative engagement. Asimova has chosen a semiotic content analysis approach in order to investigate “Digital Culture of the Regulated Industries. Focus: Tobacco Sector”. The conclusions state that although the efficacy of the legal regulations in such industries, social media, blogs and forums open possibilities for marketers in innovative ways of promotion. Contrary to all other papers the last text in the journal, written by Yankova and entitled “The Effeteness of Social Media” holds a conservative stance and argues that similarities to past social relations are more relevant than the differences. The author shows how an abstract metaphysical vision of Peirce about the universe can be extended to the cultural reality of social media.