Does cyberlit turn writers into programmers?

Technology drives cyberlit. That is a given.
But, by its very nature, technology is always changing . And while new technology is the force which drives cyberliterature, it can also be its Achilles heel. Writing is an extremely cheap art-form to practice, the basic requirements being pen and paper. What, though, are the basic requirements for cyberliterature? A computer with an internet connection, special software, a website with domain-name registration, an understanding of website design, and HTML or XHTML, at the very least, perhaps a digital camera as well as an image-processing package, and often much more. "Authors of hyperliterature don't have to be computer programmers," states Edward Picot in his Slope essay, Hyperliterature: Apotheosis of Self-Publishing?, "but they certainly do have to know a good deal more than how to set pen to paper."
Cyberwriters, like all writers, face the challenge of making the words do what they envisage, but they also face the challenge of its technology. In other words, the hypermedia poet or fiction writer who's also his/her own designer faces double-duty. "I don't want to exaggerate this aspect of hyperliterature, because it is my personal belief that original and exciting work can still be produced using nothing more than HTML," continues Picot, "but equally it must be admitted that some of the most striking recent works in the field must have taken a lot of technical know-how to produce."
A cyberwriter walks a fine line between "the desire for impressive graphic effects and the need to keep download times to a minimum to preserve reader engagement," states Carrie McMillan in her article Hypertext HyperHype. "There is a real danger that writers of hyperliterature may begin to concentrate on the hyper at the expense of the literature," she adds. "They may become so involved with the technology that they become uninteresting as writers, or they may allow a desire to enthrall and astonish their audience to get the better of their concern to say anything original and deeply-felt." (…)

It may simply be the case that the technology involved in hyperliterature will become too complicated for individual writers to cope with, with the result that the hypertexts of the future will be team efforts rather than individual ones—either teams of writers working together, or individual writers working with technical experts.
The skills "required to produce exciting work that might gain a large audience on the net may become unreachable to all but the lucky or technically dedicated," predicts Digital Fiction's Andy Campbell , and even those who might want to do it all, may not be able to. "Collaborations between graphic designers, programmers and writers are already spreading; although there are overlaps, everyone is being strictly pushed back to their own specialty." In fact, current literary e-journals exist that invite collaborative submissions, celebrating cross-genre works. Of course, any collaboration is not without its own danger. If the hypertexts of the future can only be produced by teams of people, worries McMillan, they may become almost impossible to bring out on an independent and self-financed basis.

Is this the end of hypertext's golden era or just the beginning? Keeping it simple or hazarding the complexities of collaboration—which will it be? The answer may be "both." Future cyberwriters will become not programmers but designers of their own visions either by reveling in simplicity or the experimentation complexities of collaboration, embracing future technology as a new century's tools for creative expression.

Marshall McLuhan believed that content follows form, calling media "the extensions of man." That certainly seems true with writing in cyberspace. The "insurgent" technologies will "give rise to new structures of feeling and thought, new manners of perception."

And those new perceptions must, naturally, take into account the "other" language, the language of the computer that allows a writer's vision to come to cyber-life. In considering his experimentations with a new software—the "'neath text," as he calls it—cyberpoet Jim Andrews offers philosophical thoughts about the uneasy relationship between the very human feeling of poetry, the ghostly creative muse, and the mechanical feeling of creating poetry via computer: It is apparently ironic that we use machines to convey our humanity, but the irony is only apparent when we acknowledge the ghost in the machine and acknowledge also that we made the machine for the ghost to travel in...The "'neath text" is to some forbiddingly technical and automated. Yet the ghostie may appreciate it, the ghostie neath and above and around the "neath text".

What are cyberlit's advantages?

Linkage, Interactivity/Non-Linear Narrative

The linkage dynamic that hypertext gives to cyberspace is, of course, its definitive literary advantage. As critic Carrie McMillan put it, "Those who sing the praises of hypertext fiction/electronic poetry and prose, whatever you may wish to call it often cite above all the possibilities it offers the writer for non-linear narratives, a break away from traditional story structures into a new realm..."

Traditional linear narrative found in the time-honored book format may hold the reader's attention over all other structures, but for the computer screen, the hypertextual format offers a much more natural and appealing way for a reader to read a story, any story, since it avoids tedious text-scrolling. It also gives far more latitude to the writer. Beginnings, endings and chronological order are not the inevitabilities they are in book format, flashbacks and parallel storylines are more natural, and even backward and sideways movement is possible.

Also, hypertextual writing mimics the way our minds work, presenting choices and ideas with every click. Cybernarratives can become a multi-layered world of non-chronological events, as McMillan points out, such as the interactive game-like computer narrative fiction, Dark Lethe, where readers contribute their own writing to the make-believe world. Or the cyberwork can be a "literary introspective meandering with a stream of consciousness feel, often about the act of writing itself, as seen in a work such as Water Always Writes in Plural."

But perhaps its best advantage is that is more like real life: "Linear narratives are poor at showing the kind of existence where people just muddle along from one situation to another, without getting anywhere in particular or learning any valuable lessons," explains Edward Picot. "They perpetuate a myth of personal progress—the idea that life is leading us somewhere, even if it's to tragedy. And because they oblige their writers to simplify the stories they tell for the sake of forward momentum, they also perpetuate a myth of reality."

Hypertextual writing also forces us to be more poetic in our understanding of the form itself. "With hypertext we focus, both as writers and as readers, on structure as much as on prose," Robert Coover points out, "for we are made aware suddenly of the shapes of narratives that are often hidden in print stories...We are always astonished to discover how much of the reading and writing experience occurs in the interstices and trajectories between text fragments. The text fragments are like stepping stones, there for our safety, but the real current of the narratives runs between them."

Cyberspace's writerly advantages, though, go much farther than its creative hyperlink potential.

Accessibility-Process/Revision

A web-published piece unlike a print piece is always and forever revisable. A cyberpoem or cyberfiction is finished at its "published" point, allowing it to do all the things that a published print piece should—stand on its own, be of its time period, and ultimately stand the test of time. But the unequivocal finality of a print author's creation is not necessarily true for the cybercreator. Just because it has been "published" to the web, doesn't mean it's forever final. Being "published" takes on a acutely different meaning in the creative universe that is cyberspace.

Case in point: "Headed South," a memoir project was published in Kairos in 1998. In a print journal, whatever version of a piece is published in a 1998 print journal edition would be the one forever in that edition. But online, links change all that. First, the "piece" of an e-literary magazine is often not physically at the e-journal's location (server). It has linked, naturally enough, to the piece wherever it resides, and therefore sends the reader "there." So, a researcher stumbling upon the 1998 Kairos edition's publication of Headed South, might see a 1998-1999 copyright but find a work updated in 2003. Its author can continue to update her website, presentation, even her memoir, and yet it will can continue to be linked to the original edition where it first saw "print."

That may seem highly unusual for a creative piece, yet its an obvious advantage for the cyberwriter (or a temptation for the obsessive/compulsive one). Unless an effort is made to duplicate the original, no other version but the present one exists—the version online is always the eternal original.

How to publish cyberliterature?

Publishing in cyberspace is easy, and it's hard—easy to hit the publish button, hard to be "discovered." Even the meaning of the word "publish" holds a different connation for cyberspace. Every internet-connected desktop publishing application offers to "publish" a work by choosing the word from a menu and launching it into cyberspace, and that self-publishing dynamic is what has given the cyberlit medium its disreputable "aura" since its inception. As theorist Amanda Griscom describes it, "This literary renaissance in which the masses can distribute their information without having to be chosen or favored by the powers that be is theoretically appealing, but it can be utterly overwhelming to try to navigate."

It's as if someone has place the library and bookstore in the middle of the highway and is herding every last diary, gossip, phone chat, and back alley banter through it. Words are everywhere, but which ones to read? And that, Griscom would say, begs the question for the cyberwriter: "Does a literary work on a website in cyberspace exist if no one visits it?"

In the "print" sense of the word, being published means gaining recognition for your work in some broad, communally accepted way dealing with audience. Oddly enough, the answer for quality cyber-publication is the same one it has always been, the old "print" way with a twist. Links, appropriately enough, are the cyberspace equivalent of a publishing future, and the most desired links are to widely-visited sites and online journals who take submissions in the same way that print journals do. In other words, after a work is created from within a writer's website and server, the writer then "Net"works, literally and figuratively. And one of the best ways is the time-honored way of submitting work to like-minded online publications and contests.

Why? Readers must rely on some authority to separate the wheat from the chaff, as it were, just as it has always been, Griscom points out. Search engines, as good as they are, still do not a literary community make. Griscom quotes internet expert and MIT professor Randall Davis on the topic:

But as with most things that are conceptual, any explanation is just a word picture. As one professor summarized the effort for his students: "Cyberspace is a way of grasping something that cannot be grasped except by means of metaphor. If time is a river, cyberspace is a continent lit up at night, across which we bound like action heroes, covering unthinkable distances."

What is hypertext?

The magic, the hallucination that we now so commonly call the internet, the vast universal library of the world wide web, is made possible by that galaxy of links, or lexias, created by hypertext. What does the word "hyper-text" mean?

First, what does text mean? The word text itself comes from the Latin word for weaving and for interwoven material, and it has come to have extraordinary accuracy of meaning in the case of word processing. When we write text, we are interweaving our thoughts and words into sentences with syntax that makes textual sense. Hypertext then, adds linkage to that interweaving. It is the "textual dynamic" that allows text to travel, and by its nature, offers a creative tool for the writer in this new medium.

The term was coined in 1965 by visionary Ted Nelson whose Xanadu project, is considered the inspiration for many of today's internet dynamics. But the idea of such a machine with a dynamic of info links, goes back as far as 1945 when Vannevar Bush posed the idea as a match to the way our minds work.

Links—that jumping from webpage to webpage that inspired the familiar information superhighway metaphor was foreseen by theorist Roland Barthes in 1974 as text blocks of words and images linked electronically by multiple paths or trails in "an open-ended, perpetually unfinished textuality described by the terms 'link, node, network, web, and path.'" Barthes suggests the text is a "galaxy of signifiers," reversible, that we gain access to it by several entrances, no one of which can be authoritatively declared to be the main one; the codes it mobilizes extend as far as the eye can reach."

Think page as cyberspace; think text, then think hypertext that allows jumps from information text to text into infinity...or, as artists do, think of the entirety of it as a creative medium to explore. As one interactive fiction theorist explained metaphorically, it is a territory where "the links are the roads, the reader is a traveler, clicking is a mode of transportation, and the itinerary selected by the traveler is a 'story.'"

What is cyberliterature?

"Poetry has entered the electronic landscape," declares poet Loss Pequeno Glazier in his essay "Jumping to Occlusions." Even if such a landscape suggests "images of electronic video games or machine-readable iambics... the fact is that the electronic world is a world predominantly of writing." Though this writing often seems eclipsed by its mode of transmission (electronic mail and the world wide web...), Glazier believes this is not that different from all previous writing, eclipsed by other communication such as "the book the stone tablet, and the scroll." Like all previous types of writing, electronic writing also engages the double "mission" of any writing—"to be about a subject, but also to be about the medium through which it is transmitted."

What is cyberliterature? It is literature about an idea but also about cyberspace, the unique medium in which it exists. Most of the creative writing done especially for cyberspace is hypertextual in some fashion. In its earliest days, as with most things connected to the internet, electronic "hypertext" literature boomed in the 1990s then seemed to bust only to reinvent itself. As critic Carrie McMillan points out, there's now "a renewed emphasis on the creative possibilities offered by the Internet." And that means hypertext. The hypertextual dynamic, the way words and images can be linked to other words and images, creates a whole new creative medium for the creative writer. As two early hypertextual writers explained the brand new form in 1991: "This is a new kind of fiction and a new kind of reading. The form of the text is rhythmic, looping on itself in patterns and layers that gradually accrete meaning, just as the passage of time and events does in one's lifetime."

Hypertext "could be construed as kind of Literary MTV," explains Alt-X's Mark Amerika. It is a reading in which the readers/participants actively click their way into new writing or textual spaces (that now might include graphics, moving pictures, sound, animation, 3-D modeling, etc.). Calling these hypertext jumps or links "alterna-reading choices" he explains hypertext as a new literary tool: "Hypertext, as a concept, suggests an alternative to the more rigid, authoritarian linearity of conventional book-contained text...In the middle of reading or viewing a hypertext (and isn't it always a middle-reading?), the reader/participant is given a number of options to select from..."

Hypertextuality can be at the heart of a creative piece or it can be just another tool in the hands of a creative writer. The hyperliterary dimension of a poem, for example, doesn't have to be a required part of a reading, but can add depth.

What are its subgenres called?

Literature created in a digital environment can't exist for long without adapting to the new medium. And that cyberspace adaptation has most recently coined the term hypermedia or new media to include graphics, sound, video, animation, and other media dimensions.

But even that specific definition isn't all that new. Early cyberliterature expert George Landow saw hypermedia as simply hypertext that includes "verbal discourse" via images, maps, diagrams, and sound that expands the notion of text beyond the solely verbal. New technology, now standard on most 21st century computers, though, has created subgenres that bring hypermedia into the literary mainstream beyond, perhaps, what Landow might have envisioned. For the purposes of this exploration, the term "cyberlit" or "cyberliterature" will be used, but the creative medium of cyberspace is still so new and continually re-invented, that no real agreement seems to exist on what name it should be known as, much less what it's exact definition should be.

Names abound for cyberpoetry, for instance: flash poetry liquid poetry virtual poetry visual poetry, soft poetry, electronic poetry, computer poetry, the list goes on, as does the confusion, of course. Electronic poetry, or epoetry, is often used to describe both the most innovative cyber creations as well as a traditional piece of "print" poetry available on the internet. In fact, the terms vary so widely in the new digital poetry subgenre that Jorge Luiz Antonio offers an entire article on the terms used in this emerging subgenre by its practitioners, from click poetry to holopoetry, along with links to poet's sites or works.

In describing the dynamic of the ever-expanding, ever-fluctuating subgenre cyberworld, cyberpoet Robert Kendall describes his own labels:

How is cyberliterature different from print literature?

There is always the page. Whether we read the text on it and write the text on it—whether the page is a piece of paper or white space on a computer screen, we think, as readers and writers, in printed text on a "page." But what happens when a writer, gazing at the computer screen's "page," wonders, "If this can be created, what else might be?" The answer is the difference between literature created for cyberspace and for print. Or as expressed by early cyberwriters Carolyn Guyer and Martha Petry, it's the difference between "sailing the islands and standing on the dock watching the sea. One is not necessarily better than the other." Some basic differences are worthy of notice for the cyberwriter:

Cyberliterature favors the short form.

Electronic literature is shorter than traditional print literature. Content follows form, as we know. The space of the internet is the screen, and it seems to dictate that the more involved and creative the piece, the shorter it should be. It is also a logistical problem, say critic Edward Picot. "The longer a text is, the more effort it would take to sustain a high level of multimedia effects all the way through."

Writing in cyberspace "moves."

Electronic Labyrinth's creators, in explaining one of theorist Jacques Derrida's concepts, suggest that words "move" from their original meaning. Writing forces a separation of ideas from "their source of utterance." Once the source of an idea is no longer "there" to explain the ideas behind the printed words, the words can take on unintended connotations for a reader.
Electronic text also moves but in quite different ways. Michael Joyce, hyperfiction pioneer, once said that print "stays itself" while hypertext "replaces itself." Hypertextual writing seems to have an ephemeral quality.
The materials of the technology have a direct effect on the actual path of writing, states Loss Pequeno Glazier. "In the electronic environment, the materials shift...Fonts rage wistful or out of control and the "size" of paper irrelevant..." Electronic texts move writing into charged space, where words themselves begin to move from context to "dystext": pieces or fragments of text. "This is a dance outside the linear, outside the line," Glazier believes. "An interesting place for writing...as they say in Texas, "real cowboys don't line dance." How could this ever work, especially in poetry where there may not be a narrative flow? L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet Ron Silliman once wrote, "When words are, meaning soon follows. Where words join, writing is." This is hypertextual writing on the web, a writing based on links.
Early hypermedia poet Brian Kim Stefans was one of the first to grasp the idea of the possibilities of a cyberpoetry created with words freed from the page and the cross genres waiting there. He alluded to this switch in an introduction to his genre-expanding "Dreamlife of Letters," referring to earlier attempts being "antique 'concrete' mode, belonging to a "much older aesthetic." With "Dreamlife," the surreal result gives a whole new meaning to "words that move."

Hypertext works like our minds.

Hypertextual writing works more like our minds does. Most print text found in books stresses lineality, a "one-thing-at-a-time" way of thinking, as media theorist Marshall McLuhan expressed it. But not so with electronic media based on links.
"What are links but faults in the monolinear imagination?" asks cyberpoet Loss Pequeno Glazier. Freud wrote about parapraxis, faults in reading, writing, and speaking, "slips of the tongue," that happen when the mind shifts into an associative disposition. "Although Freud would probably suggest that conclusions may be drawn from parapraxis," states Glazier, "the ability to read linked writings depends not on conclusion but occlusion, or an aberration of the eye, literally and homophonously...a fusion of parts extending into a plethora of directions."

Hypertextual writing is "decentered."

Instead of text blocks flowing steadily down the page, as they would in a printed text, a hypertext narrative can offer many "paths" through the structure of blocks and links provided by the author. It is, what theorists call, "decentered." A hypertextual text has no fixed center; rather, its center keeps shifting as the reader chooses links and "rides" their trains of thought. "From the side of authors, the computer becomes an instrument on which they both compose and perform their work; from the side of readers, each time they access the work they choose links that create a single actualised experience out of innumerable other potential ones," explains theorist Paul Delaney.
In other words, the creative piece, according to reader choice, moves from one link to another which "create" various readings of the same piece of literature—not page 1 to page 2, necessarily, but perhaps page 1 to page 15 to a footnote, to a link on the WWW, back to page 15. It's all up to the reader's choices offered by the writer's skill. Of course, the art comes in manipulating the whole to create the desired effect or effects on the reader, whatever choices the reader makes. In a hypertext fiction, we might refer to a path as a storyline or storylines. Beginnings and endings, the basic demands of any book, now are up for debate. With hypertext, a writer is free to discard old structural conventions and traditional ideas of closure—often leaving the "problem" of the ending to the reader.

Cyberlit can offer "reader/writer interactivity."

Theorists call a text that can be changed or manipulated by reader input a "writerly" text; a text that elicits nothing more than page turning is a readerly text.
Hypertextual writing, allows the reader into the "meaning" of a work that is reminiscent of the way Walter Benjamin explains the difference between distraction and concentration in viewing art. He tells the legend of the Chinese painter who when viewing his finished painting, enters the work, fully absorbed by it.
The key word in hyperliterature is choice—the writer enjoys creating different ways to read a story and readers enjoy "creating" their own story told version by not just turning a page, but creating a path, "entering" the work. As expressed, the dynamic, cyberliterature offers two kinds of such interactivity, "full" and "selective."
In selected interactivity, the reader chooses from as many choices as the author allows, creating combinations that when done well have a fascinating literary effect. The choice may be as complex as a long poem by Stephanie Strickland offering three navigations methods—the random reading, the complete reading, and the link-driven reading—entitled The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot. (The piece, winner of 1999 Boston Review prize, is also in print version, offering another reading experience, yet a tellingly different one.) But even simple interactivity can offer a very non-print literature experience, such as a short piece by Robert Kendall, Study in Shades.
Full interactivity offers a reader the chance to add to the piece, much like a computer game or a piece of shareware gone literary. These cyberworks can range from dark creations, such as "Fractured," (requires Flash) to light-hearted, shareware-style literary games such as "Field of Dreams."

Cyberlit can redefine "authorship."

Of course, such interactive works beg the question of authorship, another critical theory topic cyberspace inspires. Critics Roland Barthes and Michael Foucault are well-known for writing about what is called the "Death of the Author," but not until the cyberspace era did the concept ring true. Anyone who's surfed the internet understand this now. "We are dealing here with an electronic orality that contrasts with the much more focused encounter between a single book and a solitary reader," explains Delaney.
The idea of "author"—the idea of intellectual rights, of owning one's creation—originally came with print culture and the Gutenberg Press. There was a time when texts we now call "literary" (narratives, folk tales, epics, tragedies, comedies) were circulated without any thought about the identity of their authors.
But, in truth, as theorist David Bolter writes, "The sense of infinite possibilities offered by hypertext is an illusion."
And, in most cyberspace works, except for those offering "full" interactivity where the reader is offered "agency," to become a "co-author," it is an illusion created by an author, no matter how many choices a reader might have. Be it hypertextual fiction, digital fiction or hypertextual poetry, the movement is still in the hands of the "author/creator/writer." Whether we enjoy the dance, and maybe even feel we, the writerly reader, add a flair to the dance, it is still, ultimately, the author's dance we are dancing.

Cyberspace has no "originals."

With printed text, the story or poem there is always an original that one can return to, a visceral first edition, however many new print runs or revised editions there may be. But what is the original of a hypertext work of art? In the world of the computer, the question makes little sense. There are no originals in cyberspace. The shift from ink to electronic code, what Jean Baudrillard calls the shift from the "tactile" to the "digital," an information technology that combines fixity and flexibility, order and accessibility, but at a cost. Since electronic text-processing is a matter of manipulating computer-manipulated codes, all texts that the reader-writer encounters on the screen are virtual texts.
The very fact that a cyber document or creation transmits and transforms experience at the same time limits it to the realm of "simulacra," a debased reflection, understood as inferior to the abstraction from which it is derived." It challenges the very notion of a "true copy" or authentic rendering.
Walter Benjamin might have mentioned the missing quality to be its "aura"—its special, one-of-a-kindness—what 20th century humankind lost in a world of reproductions. In a cyberspace context, the loss of "aura" might seem to fit, except not even the original is "original," since even as it's being created it is just a series of zeros and ones behind the screen text. "All texts the reader and the writer encounter on a computer screen exist as a version created specifically for them while an electronic primary version resides in the computer's memory," explains theorist Jay David Boulter:
If you hold a magnetic tape or optical disk up to the light, you will not see text at all...In the electronic medium, several layers of sophisticated technology must intervene between the writer or reader and the coded text. There are so many levels of deferral that the reader or writer is hard put to identify the text at all: is it on the screen, in the transistor memory, or on the disk?

Is it really literarily "new"?

Cyberspace is certainly new, the computer era is certainly new, the entire medium is certainly new. But is the emerging literature being created with the new medium's hypertextuality "new?"

By definition, hypertextual writing inspires a non-linear narrative technique, a technique in itself that isn't literarily new. Novelists and poets have long experimented with ways of conquering the normal demands of narrative, from structure to marginalia and footnotes, writers such as Laurence Sterne, James Joyce, Vladimir Nabokov, Julio Cortazar, Italo Calvino and Cervantes, not to mention T.S. Eliot, William Burroughs and even William Gibson. "The structural interest offered by hypertext is as yet nothing dramatically different from what writers have been doing throughout the last century," believes critic Carrie McMillan.

In fact, a case can be made for the nonlinear, fragmented roots of hypertext to go back much further than that. Even before Gutenberg, texts were often collections of scrolls, sorted in no fixed sequence. Non-linear is the structure of The Book as it's called in cybertheory circles—the Bible—whose structure pioneered the idea of what makes all books, since Gutenberg's printing of the King James Version of it. Maybe the most famous example in our literature of a single story told in a nonlinear fashion is the Bible's story of Jesus, points out critic Edward Picot "The Gospels tell the story of Jesus from four different viewpoints, sometimes with quite substantial differences of style, detail and chronological sequence...They do not have the same unity as a conventional linear narrative: they have a different kind of unity instead, more ambiguous, more fragmented, and more challenging to the reader."

Does cyber-hypertexuality, then, offer anything unique, though, for the aspiring creative cyberwriter?

In "The End of the Book" Robert Coover says yes: "True freedom from the tyranny of the line is perceived as only really possible now at last with the advent of hypertext, written and read on the computer, where the line in fact does not exist unless one invents and implants it in the text."

Cybertheorist Paul Delaney says yes and no: Hypertext can create a kind of 'zero degree' narrative, entirely liberated from the sequential imperatives of a standard plot. But does this achieve any more than those books of the 1960s that were issued unbound, so that the pages could be shuffled and read in any order?