The printing press birthed the novel, and with it the liberal humanist subject. In the same way, for the last thirty years digital technologies have been birthing new digital forms of literature, and with them comes a new subjectivity described by theorist and critic N. Katherine Hayles as ‘characterized by distributed cognition, networked agency that includes human and nonhuman actors, and fluid boundaries dispersed over actual and virtual locations’. (37) This evolving subjectivity is both represented in the aesthetics of digital literatures, and in a process of productive feedback with it.
First-generation, or classical, digital literature began with the hyperlink. Texts of this period—the Storyspace era—utilised the non-networked personal computer to present narrative in a mostly text-based format with the occasional static image. Identified by Hayles as the high-water mark of the Storyspace era, Shelly Jackson’s Patchwork Girl presents a nonlinear narrative enabled by the hypertext format, meshing together form and content to produce a novel take on the gothic and cyberpunk aesthetics.
It was not until computing power increased and networked capabilities became standard in personal desktop computers that second-generation digital literatures began to arrive. Among these second-generation texts were works of interactive fiction, which had strong ties to video games, their more demanding graphics enabled by the relatively higher processing power of the average computer. In addition, digital works of an aleatory nature started to appear as software was developed to imitate sources of randomness—so-called pseudorandom number generators. It is worth pointing out that randomness in literature pre-dates digital technologies, going back at least as far as Dada and the surrealists, but it was only until the digital devices for reading eLit had developed the capacity for randomness that it entered into digital literature’s aesthetics.
The rise of locative narrative (site-specific storytelling) coincident with the commercial availability of GPS-enabled technologies is another clear example of the link between eLit and the affordances of digital devices. (Farman) The first locative narrative arrived in 2002, two years after GPS became available commercially. This work, 34 North 118 West, used a retrospectively clunky, yet for its time state-of-the-art exclusive GPS-enabled tablet. Now with GPS technology commonplace in mobile phones, an explosion of locative narratives has occurred. Among them, Breathe by Kate Pullinger makes use of Google’s mapping data and the smartphone camera to evoke the digital gothic—a translation of the paranormal worries of gothic fiction to the age of continuous digitally-mediated sociality. Pullinger’s ghosts watch you from close-by, familiar locations, narrating their haunting of your street, while the digital device in your hand reminds you that Google haunts you too.
A more recent (but hardly cutting-edge anymore) delivery device technology to birth a genre of digital literature is Twitter, with its corresponding genre, twitterfiction. Twitter provides a unique interaction of time with the split between public and private. Serialised twitterfiction can create the illusion of a fictionalised world with events happening in real time, (Thomas) providing a different mode of engaging with the text, more akin to a performance than a static text. This interpretation is further strengthened by the nature of the readers as audience, rather than a disjoint collection of solitary readers. It is here the interactive aspect is most pronounced: sharing, retweeting and discussion mirror the actions of an audience at a performance, rather than a reader’s passing book recommendation or the occasional enthusiast’s book club.
Hayles, N. Katherine. ‘Electronic Literature’ in New Horizons for the Literary, University of Notre Dame Press, 2008.
Farman, Jason. ‘Site-Specific Storytelling and Reading Interfaces’ in Mobile Interface Theory: Embodied Space and Locative Media, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020.
Jackson, Shelly. Patchwork Girl, Eastgate Systems, 1995.
Knowlton, Jeff, Naomi Spellman, and Jeremy Hight. 34 NORTH 118 WEST, 2002, https://34n118w.net/.
Pullinger, Kate. Breathe, 2018, https://breathe-story.com/.
Thomas, Bronwen. ‘140 Characters in Search of a Story’ in Analyzing Digital Fiction, edited by Alice Bell, et al., Taylor & Francis Group, 2013.