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| THESIS CENTRAL |
I use the term World Wide Web (WWW) interchangeably with the term Internet. There is a difference though. The Internet has been with us for several decades and has been used mainly by governments and universities until the invention of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990's. The World Wide Web is only a part of what the Internet is used for. There are other areas of the Internet which are also having dramatic effects on literature and will change how we witness and create narratives. The most used of these other Internet sectors are email, Usenet newsgroups, Chat rooms, chat TV, Avatars, Virtual Communities Telnet, FTP, and Gopher. For this thesis I will discuss the World Wide Web and its impact upon literature. A short glossary follows this text.
One of the changes that the W. W. W. brings to narrative is the perception of mythologised history. If a text is fictional we know it was written to be fictional and the narrative is not believed but instead is witnessed as entertainment. Throughout civilisation's history many myths were created to explain what we now know as natural phenomena. Most all religions are based on narrative stories created and presented as supernatural fact to control people in the society that the ideology is directed toward. As there were no ways to prove whether the stories were true or not they became accepted as true.
'History bears witness to the cataclysmic effect on society of inventions of new media for the transmission of information among persons. The development of writing and later the development of printing are examples...' (St. John, book review)
In 'Literary Machines',
Ted Nelson, the inventor of hypertext,
writes:
The way people exchange information or develop personal insights is based on linking. Linking is a natural part of learning and experience. From the first learning experiences, dealing with love, business, schooling and raising children linking nodes of knowledge is vital.
What has changed is the manner in which this link is being modified. Hypertext is the latest of many inventions that has played a crucial role in the evolution of humans. Even consciousness is considered by some schools of thought, such as Neo-Tech to be an invention.
Hypertext was invented the same way as consciousness was invented, as a means of survival and to break free of mythological beliefs. The dawn of literature was bathed in the twilight of mysticism and mythology. Poets from Homer to William Blake believed their inspiration was from a higher source, such as a god. According to Frank Wallace, the inventor of the Neo-Tech rhetoric, three-thousand years ago the human race had become too complicated to continue in the manner in which it was operating. As people moved from being solely hunters and gathers to city dwellers they needed to find a new and useful system of survival. With the 'invention' of consciousness they were able to form more complex interactions. The same could be said of hypertext. The world has become so complex, maybe even too complex, to continue in a linear single-directional manner. As narrative is one of the primary means of social representations and exchange, its current position of presentable availability is important.
Reading writings as non-linear fiction has been with us in many forms since the beginning of written human discourse. The texts from the writings of Lao Tze, the Christian Bible, Talmud, Qu'ran or other belief webs are often read in random selections. These passages or verses are often linked to other texts as in a sermon or speech. These reading are unlike short stories or novels, which are often read in their entirety in a linear manner. An example of this random textual sampling is shown at spectator sports events in the United States where placards with nothing more on them than John 3:16. These signs mean nothing to people who read them who are not familiar with the symbolic representation of human experience that these texts purport to deal with. Whereas to others they symbolise an important node of belief.
With the rise in use of the World Wide Web the reader will have as much say in the continuation of the witnessed text as will the writer. With some textual presentations now available on the World Wide Web the reader is able to change or add to the already constructed text. Much like the stories students narrate in primary school when one person sets a scene and another person adds to it, stories are added to or layered upon by people unknown to one another in various places of the world. An example of interactive stories and webfictions which are based on reader's participation for creating an interactive fiction on the web is located at http://netfict.com/
Instead of bringing an end to printed works as we know them now the World Wide Web will enhance and supplement text in hard copy. The World Wide Web is the latest instalment in the advancement of the 'Never Ending Story' with the spreading and sharing of communication in an almost instant way. It will change how we read texts over the next few decades. Through the use of hypertext, which is the foundation of the World Wide Web, linear reading of text will give way to the freedom of movement between nodes of text.
With each wave of technology we see this enhancement principal in evidence. Television did not replace radio, the two work so well together that at times they combine as they do when there is a concert and the video is from the television and the acoustic is from the radio. Videos and cable television have not replaced movies, movie theatres are still full. A local shopping centre, Marion Shopping Centre, South of Adelaide , will soon have 30 movie theatres opening in the midst of its 200 store complex. New large screen cinemas are opening in Australian cities. These IMAX cinema complexes will be five storeys high and the audience will have an immersive experience. These large screens are the opposite end to viewing a computer screen and though cinemas have nothing to do with hypertext I mention it as an indication that few styles of presentation vanish.
Cars never replaced horses, horses are still very popular though their use has changed from a necessity to one of sport or entertainment. Air planes have not replaced ships, and cruise liners are still being built. Throughout the history of inventions and discoveries humans have rarely totally replaced one mode with another, usually the new enhances and enlivens the old. At craft markets on a weekend there will be people making craft items just as they were made hundreds of years ago. There are still people in Capitalistic Western Societies who have made it their choice to live without any modern possessions, living without electricity, telephone and television. Literature will mutate, expand, combine and reform because of the World Wide Web but old ways of experiencing text (ie. books) will still be available.
Just as many printed books are illustrated we see text with illustrations on the World Wide Web. This multimedia interactive feature changes what is expected from a reading of text. From an image saturated site such as Odin's Castle to the just text presentation of Maslin's Beach or the moving poetry of komninos or his post structuralist texts the World Wide Web is changing how we experience text. Multimedia will change how we view literature as literature and images merge and become part of the same reading process. Multimedia brings literature to life and the World Wide Web at this time is the primary source for enlivened text. Texts written and produced in CD rom is presently the only other form in which to experience multimedia literature. Virtual reality programs will provide another means in which to experience text soon.
Hard copy, or what we have referred to as books for the past five hundred years are stable and non-volatile. Or they are for as long as they remain in their book form. In a fire, flood or in any one of a countless hard copy eliminating process methods, once the book has been destroyed it is gone forever. Many books and articles have been written about the death of the book the death of the author the end of history. We can look over history and see how everything becomes recycled, re-invented. Hypertext is the latest of the recycles and re-inventions. Long before there were electronic choose your own path and multiple layered stories there were multiple story telling both in oral and written narrative. As long ago as 900 BCE there were framed stories within stories in the 1001 Arabian Nights.
Jorn Barger's Hyperterrorist's Timeline of Hypertext History on the World Wide Web divides textual presentation into ten periods of time:
| (every book is handwritten, with an individual voice) | 3000BCE to 1300AD |
The Age of Printing | (the illusion of an objective voice) | 1455 to 1768 |
The Age of Electricity | (exploring an infinitely impressionable medium) | 1837 to 1941 |
The Era of Big Iron | (allowing coarse projections of human resources) | 1945 to 1968 |
The Network Era | (a radically new dimension in human communication) |
1969 to1976 |
The Micro Era | (personalised computing brings a burst of innovation) | 1977 to 1983 |
The WYSIWYG Era | (conflicting standards for aesthetic computation) | 1984 to 1986 |
The Hypertext Era | (personal hypertext generates excitement) | 1987 to 1991 |
The WWWeb Era | (global hypertext with minimal imposed structure) |
1992 to 1994 |
The Netscape Era | (NHTML evolution driven largely by user-gee-whiz factor) | |
1995 to present. | Timelines are rapidly shrinking constantly bringing new ways of presenting text. |
PAST |
...Narrative is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, tragedy, drama, comedy, mime, painting (think of Carpaccio's Saint Ursula ), stained glass windows, cinema, comics, news items, conversation...narrative is present in every age, in every place, in every society; it begins with the very history of mankind. There never has been a time period or a society without narrative. Caring nothing for the division between good and bad literature, narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural: it is simply there, like life itself. (Barthes 1977)
"In the beginning was the word and the word was with God", The Christian Bible proclaims. From the time of that first word, which we could date back to a particle of a nanosecond before the Big Bang, the word has been formulating itself in clearer and clearer forms. Literature is the concreteness, the word made text, of that first great word that has brought creation to its present state. On our particular particle of dust in this remote area of just another universe we have spent the past few thousand years on a quest, the quest of constantly improving communication through story telling of who we are and why we believe we are here.
The World Wide Web, like every particle in the universe is a linking mechanism. Before there was the World Wide Web there was a much simpler form of hyper-communication. Oral story telling, often in tribal settings, was for thousands of years the only way to present and preserve narratives. Aside of Palaeolithic cave art with its fixation on horses and cows there are no records of the discourses of humans from tens of thousands of years ago.
Daniel Chandler divides oral and written into two categories giving a list of differences:
Spoken Word
Written
Word
aural visual
impermanence permanence
fluid fixed
rhythmic ordered
subjective objective
inaccurate quantifying
resonant abstract
time space
present timeless
participatory detached
communal individual
Human's first exposure to writing began about 3,500 BC in Sumeria and it took five hundred years for the development of hieroglyphs and another 1300 years to have the first true phonetic alphabet. It took humans five-thousand years to go from their first scribbles to finding a way to mass produce printed words with Guttenberg's Press. We only go back to 1964 to have the first word processor being invented.
Printing has been the tool of learning, the preserver of knowledge, and the medium of literature. Until the advent of radio it was the great means of communication. (Chappell p. 3) Literature on the World Wide Web has an almost early printing press image to it. Books printed during the Renaissance had text surrounded by images, usually religious images. The first illustrated book, was made in 1461 by Albrecht Pfister. (Carter, Martin, Febvre)
Before there was the Internet, printed books, the first library at Alexandria and before hieroglyphics, humans shared, made up and spread stories. We can only speculate how stories were told and spread during pre-recorded history. With no way to preserve stories or to pass them on except through oral story telling all stories became linked as one person told another and the stories travelled from tribe to tribe. Stories would change in their telling and what seemed to be fact to those who heard the stories became what we now refer to as myth.
With the World Wide Web we still may not know the source of a narrative but we know it did not arrive through magic or from the gods. Yet there is an easy comparison made with early oral story telling and the World Wide Web. Both oral and technological story telling are susceptible to flux, revision and the whims of the presenter. Whereas, for the past five-hundred years we have had texts preserved through the printing process we now have returned to when literature had no fixed address.
In narratives of the past there has been the implied author , the person whom the reader assumes is the creator of the narrative. However, on the World Wide Web the implied author can easily be a group of authors. The World Wide Web is now a tribe with interweaving and constantly changing narratives.
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In Plato's Phaedrus Theuth shows his invention of writing to King Thamus, claiming that it will improve both the wisdom and memory of the Egyptians. But the King replies,
Your pupils will have the reputation for wisdom without the reality; they will receive a quantity of information without proper instruction, and in consequence be thought very knowledgable when they are for the most part quite ignorant. And because they are filled with the conceit of wisdom instead of real wisdom they will be a burden to society. (Postman p. 4)
The history of printing is an integral part of the general history of civilisation. Printing changed the way narration was recorded and perceived and it broke down the barriers of order and control in society which were in place during the Middle Ages. What was lost with printed literature was the illusion that spoken narrative provided with its direct speech.
The invention of movable type was the greatest single event in the history of narration before the computer then the internet and now the World Wide Web enhanced the spreading of text. The printing press provided the first information revolution and the Internet is providing the second information revolution. And just as the printing press brought about a world change so too does the World Wide Web.
It took a whole century for the printed book to develop a form of its own that was no longer dominated by the aesthetic traditions of the medieval manuscript. It was in the 16th century Italy that the format of the printed book emerged from the experimental and transitional phase and found a basic stability of form that lasted for the next three centuries. By the end of the 19th century the old manual processes had been replaced by mechanical production with power-driven machinery. (Chaytor, Clancy, Spender, Eisenstein, Butler) It has taken just three years, since the release of Netscape , for tens of millions of people to become involved with the World Wide Web. The World Wide web may never develop a distinct form, but will continually reinvent itself. This means that literature as we know it will continually be reinvented too.
Narrations and information were placed into books as an insurance against the loss of oral traditions which grew beyond the possibilities of memorising . As more information from more people became known there had to be a means in order to save this material. Early books were made up of collections of magic formulas, dynastic records, laws, observations , medical experiences and experiments along with prayers and rituals (the first manuscript printed by Gutenberg was a copy of the Christian Bible in 1450). These first attempts at recorded history were not intended as entertainment or causal readings but were a means to reinforce the social status quo in which they were read. Today most of these early works would be found in the reference section of a library, or they would be stored on the Internet.
Humanism may have owed the ultimate survival of its ideas to Gutenberg's invention (Bolgar p. 280) To repeat what others have said, The Renaissance did less to spread printing than printing did to spread the Renaissance (Hirsch pp. 24-37, Eisentein p.180, Bolgar p.157) We have this same phenomena with the Internet in this new narrative Renaissance. It is the World Wide Web and its huge exposure to and from all cultures which is spreading the oneness of multi-cultural narrative. Humanism survives and takes on a wider and more holistic scope with many cultures being nodes of one another which can be easily linked to.
The first recorded bodies of texts were done over long periods of time, usually by scribes. The beginning of non-linear reading began in late Roman times when books began to appear in codex form. This was a gradual transition which extended over several hundred years, by the 4th century AD the process was complete. (The Encyclopedia Americana Vol. 4, p.220) Previously to pages that could be turned text was placed upon papyrus which had to be unrolled to be read. With pages the reader could go back and forth within the text they were reading. Also with pages there was the possibilities of having page numbers, tables of contents and references.
The art of printing originated in Germany in 1440 and spread quickly through the
world. Commenting on this invention Harmann Schedel published in 1493 (though
written in 1464) the following notation regarding Gutenberg's invention:
...by means of this invention the precious treasures of knowledge and wisdom, which have long lain hidden in the old manuscripts, as it were, in the grave of ignorance, unknown to the world, have now come forth to the light. (Butler p.102)
Marshall McLuhan points to the stripping of the senses and the interruption of their interplay in tactile synaesthesia as one of the side effects of the Gutenberg technology. (McLuhan 1962, p.17) The World Wide Web further enhances this stripping of the senses as multi-directional links and multimedia create the medium within the interplays and interpretation of the message .
The founder of the Internet browser, Netscape, James Barksdale points out that
"The Internet is the printing press of the technology era. How often have you seen technology adopt a rate similar to the Internet's Forty million Netscape users in its first two years..."
MEANING |
Meaning within narratives has made dramatic changes between the time of early oral story telling and the rise of the World Wide Web. Before the printing press meaning was limited to an ascribed source, usually the Church or a ruling person or government. With the mass production provided by the printing press, printed text still had an ascribed meaning with the meaning of a text under the control of the creator of the text. Now with the use of the World Wide Web, meaning has made a shift unparalleled in human discourse. In the non-linear and unstable environment of the Internet meaning within narrative is more of an arbitrary means to an end.
The medium used to distribute narrative affects the evolution of the narrative. As narrative is valuable and grows by an evolutionary process the rate by which the use of the Internet is growing should make literature evolve at a rate never conceived of before. The meaning within a narrative on the World Wide Web can change instantly. On the Internet Meaning no longer has meaning of any determinable value.
In the past the broadest categories for literary forms has been prose and verse. These forms now merge with nodes of prose and nodes of verse linking to one another. Because of the unstable nature of the Internet this merging of various forms is becoming evident even in linear traditional written texts. An example of this merged form which is written as a traditional linear text and is also available on the Internet can be found at https://www.angelfire.com/hi/OURCHILD/ TRYTHIS.html. Here prose and poetry meet on the same page and meaning is dependant on whether the reader reads the poems which intercepts the narrative's linear direction.
Most literature in modern times is printed but long before there was the printing press there was a long history of oral narrative. Oral narrative dates back to ancient Greece and was an important part of Medieval Europe life. Travelling poets entertained audiences by reciting and performing their works prior to the rise of the printing press. On the Internet narrative creators are considered to be travelling the electronic highway as they place their stories on the World Wide Web.
When printing began making its mark on the world some of the first narratives printed were about adventures in the New World. Contemporary with the invention of the printing press were the discoveries of the Americas. The Conquistadors brought back and had printed their stories of narrative acres settled and developed by the new form of interactive literature. Michael St. Hippolyte describes his web site, "Mumble Jumble", as,
'Mumbo Jumbo is a few acres of jungle and beachfront on the Web, hoping to provide a taste of passion and its nobler fruits. Passion: the collective name for mysterious emotive forces churning just below the margin of our consciousness, shooting inspiration from time to time into the blue sky of the human imagination.'
Michael St. Hippolyte
POETRY |
What the World Wide Web does for poetry is to make reading an experience. Reading becomes a performance taking in both creator and witness. This new computer generated poetry written for the Internet without any intention of ever being published in a traditional print medium is now refered to as cyberpoetry, a term which komninos konstantinos zervos claims to have coined. Kominian discusses cyberpoetry in detail at http://student.uq.edu.au/~s271502/phd/cf00.html. There are millions of examples of how present and past poets present their poetry on the Internet, some are more dramatic than others. One search engine stated, 'About 607760 documents match your query,' under the keyword 'poetry', showing how many people are willing to share their verses for free with the world. And each author hoping to be discovered and loved and understood by the tens of millions of Internet viewers we are constantly told are wandering the web.
In the Preface to the
Lyrical Ballads, William Wordsworth wrote,
'My purpose was to imitate, and, far as is possible, to adopt the very language of men...'
The Internet as a transformation of literature as we know it has the good and difficult sides to it. On the plus side is that anyone can put their writing on at anytime. On the difficult side is the massive amounts of narrative which appear on the World Wide Web. There is also the difficulty with knowing who the actual creator of the web site we are witnessing is. As an author creating text there are dangers to contend with. With a computer it is so easy to lift chunks out of texts and copy them. It becomes an almost impossibility to know whether someone will take sections of your writing and use it with their own document, and if they do what can be done? There is also the issue of money. I doubt that anyone will pay to go to someone s sites and read their poems, stories, articles, thesis or even novel. Being published on the internet is a long ways from being published by a book publisher. There is just too much stuff on the Internet for anyone to care about what an individual has to say to pay to read them unless they are already known.
With printed literature the reader was able to identify with the text. This identification had a morbid affect on many readers of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther, who either committed suicide or attempted it. Every romantic young man felt that he was Werther. (Koestler p. 345) As people have associated and projected themselves into the narratives contained within books what becomes of the association with characters within web pages on the World Wide Web?
Point of view selects and shapes the meanings of texts. It is not so much a single concept as a cluster of concepts, covering several aspects of the relationship between narrator, story and reader: the style and structure of the telling, the perspective from which things are seen, and the assumptions and values that pervade the text. (Reid p.12) Hypertext's greatest value is in its reshaping of the textual landscape of the narrative as it has been presented in the past.
The danger of writing hypertext literature is to have too many links so that everything breaks down into incoherency. It would be like having Susan Howe write a novel instead of just one of her poems. Howe explains her work:
This is close to what many people do with their World Wide Web pages, they combine so much on to one page that it all becomes as incoherent as a Susan Howe poem. If her poems are impossible to make sense of what would a hypertext novel from her be like? There have been attempts to have a poem with every word linked to another site, what happens in these situations is that the reader becomes lost and may never find the way back to the origin of the poem. A poem of this sort is at http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~benedett/lit/mercury. html. Produced below to give a feeling of a poem with many links. The poem on the left shows the poem without the links and on the right with the links.
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Mercury This is probably not the best way to go although I don't know what I might have done differently unless I had been a different person might have had more backbone to stand up to him but now I'm almost there and what's that noise no it better not be oh god it is and well I guess I can come back later when the crowd is gone the cops will stop them I just better not let them see me till later I'll just get out here god I need some fresh air leave this in the car there's a mall I wonder what oh no the keys too and there's a phone please no trouble no I can't get into my car no not there no just don't no please no o No. |
Mercury
This is probably not the best way to go although I don't know what I might have done differently unless I had been a different person might have had more backbone to stand up to him but now I'm almost there and what's that noise no it better not be oh god it is and well I guess I can come back later when the crowd is gone the cops will stop them I just better not let them see me till later I'll just get out here god I need some fresh air leave this in the car there's a mall I wonder what oh no the keys too and there's a phone please no trouble no I can't get into my car no not there no just don't no please no o |
MULTIPLICITY |
The World Wide Web provides facilities for building multiple views of hypertext applications which are linked with other modes within applications. This multiple views affect on narration opens up literature to many interpretations of the same text. With alternative routes there is a never ending array of possibilities. In print this multiple alternative or branching narrative was first used in Julio Cortazar's novel, Hopscotch which was published in 1966. John Irving's The World According to Garp published in 1976 also has stories within stories. At the beginning of the 1980's there were the choose your own adventure series which were widely available in children's books with their binary decision points encoded within portions of the text. For example, 'if you want the good person to wear a black hat go to page 40 or for the bad person to go to San Francisco with a flower in her hair pick page 69'. The reader takes partial control of the direction of the story. Meaning becomes transcribed by the reader dependant upon which view, or now with the Internet, with what multimedia application is being used. An Internet example of a work in progress, The Cyberspace Sonnets with hundreds of choices so far can be experienced at http://www.teleport. com/~cdeemer/cyberson.html. A much more vast and confusing linking work, Queneau's sonnets, can be found at http://www.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~goudal/htbin/Miliards/poemes-direct.cgi . Here is where we come across the exponential problem of too many links with just too many endings available to ever attempt to use every one. Mathematically narratives can break down with too many links. To have a choice in a two page story there would be three pages, the opening page and the two possible continuations. To have a five page story there would be thirty-one pages of choices. But a dozen pages could lead to over four thousand pages of choices, with a forty page novella needing a trillion pages of material. Queneau's sonnets are the results of selecting randomly from ten possibilities for each line in each sonnet. Again, it is the reader who is the ultimate creator.
A more simpler approach to hypertext poetry is at http://www.c3f.com/hyprgrd2.html which announces, 'Most fucked-up person alive tells all'. In this case we are told to
Clicking onto first birthmemory we are treated to the following narrative.
Most of the links on this site are short poetic narratives.
Another easy to follow story line is Matthew Miller's Trip Across the USA . The site has arrows that one may click to move forward or to return to the site's original introductory page. Putting the whole story together and printing it out gives a rather dull and predictable story, but by random selection of links the reader has a more interesting and unpredictable tale to read. Miller's Trip Across the USA is at http://raven.ubalt.edu/staff/moulthrop/hypertexts/aboutTRIP.html .
Two other choose your own adventures on the Internet are Shu Kuwamoto's Choose your own adventure and Allen Firstenberg's Addventure. Many Choose your own fiction stories on the Internet have a tendency to become incoherent. Links can lead to irrelevant information or story lines or continually lead back to an earlier section. Most readers are not ready for Tree Fiction as they want to known the consequences of every decision and will follow each lead. If one wants to follow the author's construction then they almost always need to read it in a linear book format.
Being known is the key to Internet success, especially if someone wanted to support themselves off of their own writing. The Internet will prove to be a great source of introduction to new writings, whether from a new writer or an already established writer. For example, a novelist could put their first chapter or an introduction to their novel on the Internet and if the reader wanted to purchase the novel then they would pay for the remainder of it and either download it to their own computer or have it mailed to them.
Several on-line novels are from:
Even though it is the easiest way to present a novel to the potential millions of readers who view the Internet most cyberwriters have a notation on their web page saying they would welcome expressions of interest from traditional publishers. (Cohen)
What web publishing lacks is the respect and realness that Web publishing does not (as yet) provide. Aside of the changeable nature of the World Wide Web where one day there may be a sophisticated site and tomorrow there will be nothing at that URL, demonstrates the fluidity of the Internet. Long pieces of work on the World Wide Web are difficult to read with current technology. There is also an issue in regards to copyright and payment to the author for their work. Unless one is charged for the time they view or for the amount which they download from a site the rewards of internet publishing will not be monetary.
There is a new group of innovative writers who are litweberature literate writing hypertextual novels and stories on CD-ROM as well as on the Internet. Several of these writers who are published by Eastgate are Michael Joyce (the best known of this genre) Judy Malloy and Stuart Moulthrop . Eastgate publishes and advertise their many authors who write Hypertext Fiction. It is only since the early 1990's that it has become a goal for some writers to remove all thoughts of progression and linearity, giving the ultimate freedom of textual chronically to the reader.
To get a sense of what their hypertextual writing do read what the critics say about the various novels that Eastgate publishes. The critics use phrases like
CONCERNS |
The argument of oral versus literate cultures is once again taking on new dimensions with the rise of the Internet. Whether people are Internet-literate or not is adding to the Great Divide theories of the 1980's, though they should be short lived. These arguments over whether a literate culture was superior to an oral culture threaten to spill over into the debate of technological communication superiority. Just as some people believe that literacy leads to higher forms of thought there are those who believe being on-line is important to communication evolution. It is easy to push this line so far as to seeing non-technological societies as inferior to ones which embrace new communication technologies such as the Internet. But the Internet will be different from other forms of communication which divided people in the past. In the past it was difficult for some sectors of society (women, poor, various ethnic and religious mixes, age: too young, too old) to obtain the technology to advance themselves. Dale Spender writes well on these topics. With the Internet, as I will say below there are many resources for anyone to make their presence felt, their say heard and their literature available.
There was the argument that the Internet would separate the rich from the poor even more. That it would be available to middle-class westerns and mainly to males (Spender). Because the United States dominants the Internet there is the questioning of United States values being projected to the world through literature as it has in past times. But this too will even out as more countries become hooked up to the Internet
Other concerns with the use of the World Wide Web as a source of literature are: rarely do articles have dates for when they were published on the Internet, was this piece written five years ago or last week and what editions or what edit is it of the original piece? At this time no on-line journals has the reputation of print academic journals and until they do print journals will be more sought after. Rarely is the source or qualifications of the author known. Just because they put a Dr in front of their name or a phd after we do not know if the writer is who they say they are. And the most upsetting aspect of the Internet is the disappearing web pages. This happens when a site is no longer on-line for any one of a variety of reasons: through the server crashing (I lost 200 sites on Angelfire because of a system crash they had, I lost over a hundred sites on geocities because they deleted a major site I had and I lost over one-hundred web-pages on another server when they went out of business - for several months there were over three-hundred of my sites - mostly poems - giving back the message of 'ERROR - The requested URL could not be retrieved'. I also lost a year's work which was difficult at the time to accept.
In Australia the Internet is widely available to anyone anywhere for free. All the libraries and schools have computers and Internet available. It is a simple matter of booking time at the library or spending long hours at university but at least in Australia there is no excuse why anyone can not have their text placed on the Internet and for free. There are many services which give free web sites; the best and easiest to use are geocities and Angelfire. There are many free community based servers along with universities and public schools that will give users free space. A list of free web sites is available from http://www.yahoo.com/Business_and_Economy/Companies/Internet_Services/Web_Services/Free_Web_Pages/ and http://www.netutopia.com/freebies/freepage.html . Angelfire and Geocities even provide templates making it extremely easy for anyone to place their poems or stories on the Internet. And for those who want to learn how to make their pages look more interesting there are many Internet based tutorials that teach simple World Wide Web language. The point being that anyone can contribute to world literature via the Internet. There are also several free World Wide Web E-Mail services, such as goplay at http://www.goplay.com and hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com. With Internet Cafes and soon Internet computers installed at shopping centres, gas stations, airports and on street corners there will be no new class of internet poor. The new World Wide Web based literature will be the literature of the people, of the reader and not necessarily of any particular institution or writer.
The World Wide Web will be more accessible to more people to place their literary genius before the tens of millions of people who view the Internet on a daily basis.
FUTURES |
Since 1945 the number of printed journals has increased from 7,500 to 140,000 and currently are increasing at the rate of more than one-thousand new journals each year. The number of new book titles published each year has increased from 300,000 to more than 850,000 since 1945. (Gilster p. 126) It is too early to forecast whether the number of new journals and books printed will decline with the use of the Internet. There are already thousands of journals on-line. Some on-line sources have the complete journal and some have just indexes to what is within the journal. The advantage of on-line journals to print journals is the rapid rate information can be retrieved without needing to have many journals to individually shift through. On-line journals will grow in number and most journals will have an on-line edition which the reader will be able to interact with. This interaction will come about by the reader being able to offer opinions and suggestions in response to what is presented.
Future literature will be made up of multiple modes linking texts, sound and movie bits as well as graphics. Literature will become an experience. With the further development of virtual reality we will be able to navigate through text, following sentences and paragraphs over textual mindscapes. The Internet like the printing press makes literature available to more people and on a larger scale than ever possible in the past. Presently hypertext is a one-way avenue, we can hypertext to another site but once within another site we can not link back. Within a few years there should be full hypertext where links can be followed in both directions. There will be editions of literary works that are intended from the start to be only created for the World Wide Web and will never exist in a printed form (Lavagnino)
Every poet or essay writer can now have a world audience . Poets in the past have struggled to get their works out. Charles Reznikoff had to publish his own books until he was in his seventies. Lorien Niedecker lived all her life in a small fishing village in Wisconsin where she scrubbed hospital floors to make a living and was not widely published until the late 1960's. Now we can publish a poem or essay as soon as we write it, we can even write it and edit it live on the Internet with the potential tens of millions of viewers watching us write. As I have done with this thesis. Of course these millions of viewers are only potential. Having had the personal experience of creating hundreds of web sites, and promoting them through the various search engines and what's-new sites, I have found that only a few sites registered more than a few hits a week. And those sites were because I put the words erotic in the title which is what the search engines display of a web site. Though for a month (September 1996, when this site registered 35,000 hits) my erotic poem of the month received over a thousand hits a day, then starting the next month it went back to a few dozen a day. I have no idea why that happened, obviously it was written up somewhere as a site to visit. I have lost interest in poems of the week and of the month and no longer up-date them, but the availability of the internet for poems and stories is always there.
CONCLUSION |
Though it is beyond the scope of this thesis one could relate the pattern defining abilities of the brain to adapt, change and as mentioned earlier to link, to the rise of the World Wide Web. Everyday thinking is equivalent to the narrative which will be redefined because of the use of the Internet. The thought processes that we are always encountering within ourselves is one of transferring from node to node. For example as a parent, student, artist, photographer, body builder, astrologer, writer and all the other things one does to be part of society, I may be one moment entertaining thoughts about my children's activities, then jump to thinking about my girl friend, my studies, body building or which time is the correct birth time for Princess Diana (2.15 PM or 7.45 PM?) or any one of a thousand and one things. Society is a linking process, and a society's narrative, to be true, is one of linked nodes.
The narrative that we experience within ourselves and within our reading or communications is now part of a global syntax. Literature can no longer continue only as a story produced in dead tree printing methods. Literature will now become reader driven as the witness-consumer-creator will produce and consume a new type of narrative. The narrative of the 21st century will be the narrative of all the world's voices weaving in and out and linking within and without providing continuos new structures and new literature unknown before this time.
'In considering transitions of organs, it is so important to bear in mind the probability of conversion from one function to another. (Darwin, p 45.)
The Internet provides us with the first time in recorded history of a world literature. For the past several decades there has been a growing consciousness of the world being one family, the interconnectedness of all life is a constant theme of the past thirty years. World literature is now easily available through the internet. At some time someone will begin a project of a world story done on the Internet. Writing a story with people from different cultural backgrounds in various countries would produce a text that would have ascribed meaning by the readers as well as the writers.
The story is no longer about what has happened to men and women and how they responded, instead it is about how the subjective and collective meanings of women and men as categories of identity have been constructed... (Scott, p.6)
Just as all forms of literature: drama, epic, essay, novel, poetry, short story, novels, plays, and movements in literature: such imagism, romanticism and surrealism and the many national literatures: American literature, Catalan literature, English Literature and German literature have become available to wide audiences through the printed text so they too are becoming popular throughout the world via the Internet with the literature of every genre imaginable.
The Internet was made to be indestructible. The American government wanted to find a way to survive nuclear war, or asteroid crashes or any of the other predictive ends that may occur. It is as if all the prophecies of the pass two thousand years about the end of the twentieth century would end in a destructive manner gave rise to the concept of a means of communication that would still be operatable even if the destructive predictions came true.
There is still in the collective memory of the human race the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 641 in which a thousands years of scholarly work was stored. Now we have a way to save the world's knowledge no matter what happens, whether the vast majority of life on earth is destroyed in nuclear war, or natural disaster, global warming or collisions with rocks from space. Human knowledge will survive humans. Of course what narrative is found by a future generation will need to be de-coded by a future generation.
Books will not lose their place, only the reader will. Books will undergo transformation through interpretation and presentation as all literature always has. The Biblical scholar Stephen Prickett prefaces his Origins of Narrative with:
During the late eighteenth century the Bible underwent a shift in interpretation so radical as to make it virtually a different book from what it had been a hundred years earlier...far from being divinely inspired or even a rock of certainty in a world of flux, its text was neither stable nor original, the new notion of the Bible as a cultural artefact became a paradigm of all literature...
(Prickett 1996)
Just as Prickett speaks about a shift in reading the Bible there is now a shift in reading the universe (Pricett 1996 p.155). Our current shift in reading via the World Wide Web is a shift in partaking of narrative exchanges.
The Internet will prove to be a great source of introduction to new writings, whether from a new writer or an already established writer. For example, a novelist could put their first chapter or an introduction to their novel on the Internet and if the reader wanted to purchase the novel then they would pay for the remainder of it by credit card and either have it sent to them electronically or download the material and print it themselves.
Multimedia is changing how narrative is presented. The onus is upon the reader whether to evaluate material on the World Wide Web and to develop the critical skills needed to give meaning to what is seen. Anyone can self-publish and have Internet sites looking highly polished and professional with very little effort using web page editors. As literature via the World Wide Web becomes ubiquitous, being all things to all people, each reader (the witness of the narrative) will create a different perspective to the original creation. The author has not died but instead has grown up and is part of a true literary-exchange
With the WORLD WIDE WEB's availability to all the individual writer-poet-heroes an individual voice of the age will no longer be occurring. There will never again be another Roland Barthes, Wordsworth, Shelley or a Shakespeare. Where there was once but a few voices now there are thousands each with a different point of view and crying out to be heard.
The World Wide Web is a digital speak-easy where literature is experienced as a process of mutating volatile virtual texts. Literature on the World Wide Web reflects the unpredictability of human life which has come close to extinction. As narratives merge, link and interact through the use of the World Wide Web humanity will redefine itself and survive, which without the Internet it might not have.
Term originated by author William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer the wordCyberspace
Cyberspace is currently used to describe the whole range of information resources
available through computer networks.
- Above, excessive or beyond. meta = among about or betweenHyper
- is a subset of interactive multimedia. Hypemedia
Generally, any text that contains links to other documents - words or phrases in the
document that can be chosen by a reader and which cause another document to be
retrieved and displayed. Ted Nelson claims to have originally coined the term Hypertext. Hypertext
(World Wide Web) -- Two meanings - First, loosely used: the whole constellation of
resources that can be accessed using Gopher, FTP, HTTP, telnet, USENET, WAIS
and some other tools. Second, the universe of hypertext servers (HTTP servers) which
are the servers that allow text, graphics, sound files, etc. to be mixed together.WWW
A more complete
may be found at: http://www.matisse.net/files/glossary.html
glossary
Inc. London. 1990.
With one of the most interesting poetry presentations on the Internet - just hit the stop button at any time and read what you get.
From: Dale Spender
To: Terrell Neuage
Subject: Re: female/male ratios
just looked it up
according to Danile McCaffrey of Netwatch
47% of users are now women dale
------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Dale Spender Internet: d.spender@mailbox.uq.oz.au
101 Boomerang Rd East Fax: +61 7 371 8780
St. Lucia QLD 4067
Australia.
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