From the Gutenberg Galaxy to the Internet Galaxy.

Digital Textuality and the Change of Cultural Landscape

 

Raine Koskimaa

Professor of Digital Culture

University of Jyvaskyla

 

 

 

In my talk I will address the ongoing cultural change through the prism of digital textuality. The invention of hypertext, initially by Vannevar Bush, and later further developed by Douglas Engelbart and Ted Nelson, gave rise to a wholly new conceptualisation of what we understand by ‘text’. The emergence of the Internet and the World Wide Web, combined with the hypertext mark-up language took hypertext to a global level. As a consequence, the cultural logic based on the forms of print text, the Gutenberg Galaxy of Marshall McLuhan, is gradually giving way to the new digital logic of what Manuel Castells has termed the Internet Galaxy.

 

As powerful a tool as hypertext is, it does not cover all the features inherent in digital media. For a better grasp of this potential, I will introduce the concept of cybertextuality. As defined by Espen Aarseth, cybertextuality refers to programmed texts, which involve computation and which behave in various dynamical ways. Cybertexts are machines, which need to be operated by the user. This operating may take the form of navigation, modification, or participation. These are exactly the main modes of action we are witnessing in the contemporary digital culture. For a wider applicability, it is necessary to widen the idea of cybertextuality to a more general notion of cybermediality.

 

Through examples of a set of digital texts, ranging from poetry to fiction and games, I'll illustrate the characteristics of the cultural logic of digital culture. The Impermanence Agent by Noah Wardrip-Fruin & al., combines biographical writing with software agent technology monitoring the reader's online activity, and creates collages of found online materials. It reveals some of the fundamental features of writing (and reading) in a networked environment, especially various forms of citation and collaboration, both between human authors, and human and machine. The Google Poem Generator by Leevi Lehto, employs a search engine for poetical composition. It highlights the utmost importance of search engines in negotiating the vast universe of online data. Various computer game-based machinima productions are deeply grounded in our contemporary ludic society. They turn the medium of game into a tool for critically reflecting the media texts we are immersed in.

 

Adalaide Morris has made an important claim: ‘what we do and see does not match the inscriptional or representational conventions through which we think’ (Morris & Swiss (eds.) New Media Poetics. Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. The MIT Press, 2006, p. 3). That is, we are dealing with the new digital technology in our daily lives, especially in communications and media use, and that is what we ‘do and see’. On a practical level, then, the new media technology is with us in a very fundamental sense. At the same time, however, our conceptual categories and theoretical ways to try and grasp the world, ‘the conventions through which we think’, are borrowed from the era preceding the digital age. The best way to try and get in terms with ‘what we do’ is to turn our attention to the programmed, software based works, which reflect, in their digital form, the everyday experience of the digitalised and mediatised world. Turning our attention to works which do not operate on the premises of 20^th Century (or earlier) text oriented theories is required before we can hope to remodel our conventions of thinking so that they will fit with our current experience in the Internet Galaxy.