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new trends in electronic literature III
Temporal writing.
The ability to change Web texts through time (to create "time-shifted" media, to borrow a phrase from this essay) is one of the fundamental, unique properties of Web-writing, and thus it should be a key consideration for current practicioners of electronic writing. And yet I find myself surprised that so few of the current crop of electronic writers are producing work that makes use of the temporal dimension. I'm also surprised that none of the web journals that publish electronic writing make allowances for time-shifted work (to the best of my knowledge).
There's certainly a huge populist explosion of this type of writing, however. Tens of thousands of people use content management systems like Blogger and LiveJournal: these systems essentially automate the organization of material into chronological streams. I wouldn't generally consider most weblogs or LiveJournals to be "electronic literature," but there's a contiunuum here, with the hyperlinked brevity of Robot Wisdom on one end. On the other end we find the literate, essay-like entries of, say, Michael Barrish's Oblivio, Steve Cook's Snarkout, or Paul Ford's FTrain (this last also includes things that apear to be personal essays but which are actually fiction). Are these sites still weblogs? Arguable, but the important point is that these sites make use of temporality: the sites are not static, and this makes us read them differently from how we would read, say, a book of short nonfiction pieces.
When applied to fiction, temporal writing often takes the form of serialized narrative, such as Phantomnation or my own Imaginary Year. A key related text is Michael Stutz's piece, "Episodic Writing."
Forerunners of temporal writing: content-management applications, syndicated newspaper columnists, periodical narratives (such as comic books), Thomas Wolfe's episodic novels, film serials, Victorian-era serializations / series novels.
Labels: electronic_literature, narrative, time, weblogs |
Tuesday, June 11, 2002
1:03 PM
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