CRD701: History and Theory of Communication Technology

I love Hayles. If I weren?t taking 4 classes next semester, I would find something she?s teaching at Duke and take it. I keep hearing how impenetrable some of her writing is, and maybe I just haven?t read her enough, but I agree with almost everything she says.

That being said, I?m going to start my discussion with Aarseth, another author whose work I thoroughly admire. I love how he forces amorphous terms (in this article and the article we read in 702) back into real definitions. He takes terms like hypertext and makes them mean something again. One of the ways he does that is by introducing new terms to help differentiate from overarching ?covers everything? terms. The best example of this is his extrication of cybertext from definitions of hypertext.

Cybertexts ?are self changing, in which scriptons and traversal functions are controlled by an immanent cybernetic agent, either mechanical or human? (773). They are interactive texts in which the texts change because of an immanent cybernetic agent. Cybertexts are interesting in their own right, but what interested me the most was his discussion of death in cybertexts. A character cannot really die in cybertext. Just like in video games, there is always a reset button. If you choose a path and a character you?ve fallen in love with gets cancer or Alzheimer?s (say, in a Nicholas Sparks cybertext), you can go back to the beginning and follow a different path and hopefully your character never gets cancer and lives a long, happy life.

Now, let?s tie this in with Hayles. Hayles discusses how different media have allowances and constraints. You can do things in print you cannot do as well electronically; you can do things electronically you can?t do in print (don?t worry I?m not falling into the simplified print-electronic binary). I?m tying this into cybertext by making a pretty bold statement: I don?t think cybertexts will ever be as popular as the book. Ever.

Now, we have to go back to our discussion of the book. I am not defining the book by the codex. I am defining the book as an information transfer technology that works with linear texts, not linear in the traditional sense because many books and movies (Godfather II, Tender is the Night, etc.) do not follow chronologically linear structures. I mean linear in the sense that the book progresses and the reader cannot change how it progresses. I don?t think it matters whether we?re talking about the codex or the kindle.

Now for my argument. In cybertexts, there can be no true foreshadowing. Any foreshadowing the writer posits is more of a hint than foreshadowing. If the writer suggest something bad might happen if the reader follows a certain path, the reader can choose to follow a different path. I think this takes away from the power of narrative. Foreshadowing is often a key piece of the greatness to the greatest of novels. In Tender is the Night, the reader knows from the beginning that things will end badly. Over the next 300 pages, we connect with characters, sometimes even fall in love with the characters, and we watch with chilling trepidation as they follow their paths to ruin. There is a destiny in linear narrative that we cannot change. A helplessness that is strangely beautiful. I think there is something existential in a traditional text. We are overwhelmed in a world where we seem to have no control, and we turn to novels as a sort of reaffirmation of that helplessness. Or maybe we turn to novel a reminder that we aren?t as helpless as we thought. We, like characters in a novel, are all on an inextricable march to that final paragraph, that final word on that final page. Unlike the characters in novels though, we have potentialities along the way. You can disagree and follow the line of argument we have had about Second Life that people now are fighting to reassert control. In the world of the novel though, I think it is that helplessness that draws us.

Cybertexts also eliminate some of the most effective forms of story telling. Take two other great novels: Robinson?s Gilead and Atwood?s Blind Assassin. Both these stories have first person narrators who are old and reflecting on their lives. To have a story like this, and many great novels do follow the form of first person narrator reflection, the reader cannot control the way the story progresses, except in very minimal ways. To tell a story of reflection there must be foreshadowing. No one reflects by telling astory in a purely chronological way. It just doesn?t make sense. Every reflection contains allusions to future events because every narrator is a manifestation of everything that has ever happened to him or her. Following this line of argument, cybertexts are incapable of telling this type of story because it would lead to inevitable textual contradiction. If the reader is able to follow a textual path that causes an earlier allusion to not happen, what happens to the narrator? Cybertexts in a way kill narrators, or at least any kind of trust we can possibly have in them.

I?m not arguing against cybertexts as a useful new medium. In a way, I?m making the opposite argument. By understanding exactly what the book allows us to do as readers and writers, we can better understand what non book forms of story telling allow. One of the themes of our class has been that new technologies add things while taking other things away. Often, we have to choose if what is added is superior to what is lost. In this case, we do not. This is not a ?Video Killed the Radio Star? situation. We can embrace new forms of storytelling while holding on to our old forms. We can also do it without placing them in some kind of hierarchy. Most books suck. I bet most cybertexts suck. But both mediums are capable of producing superior art, and one medium is not capable of producing better art than the other. Only the people working inside the mediums are capable of that.
So yeah? the book, in one form or the other, isn?t going anywhere. There will undoubtedly be some great cybertexts that might cut into the market share of the book. This doesn?t mean the death of either though . We live in a market society, and I am a great believer that competition can lead to great things. Rather than one media destroying the other, I think each will push the other to explore new possibilities. The book can find new ways to tell stories, mixing in hypertextuality and new printing techniques; cybertexts can work to form narrative without controlling it, somehow reasserting the idea of permanence and the narrator into cybertext literature.