E-literature magazines are not dead – they just move slowly
Today I checked most of my e-literature magazines bookmarks. I had some unexpected free time. It was usual suspects. I found no new links. They are mostly USA/UK based and usually connected to dedicated people form the world of the university. I do respect their efforts a lot. What I don’t like is that all of those on-line magazines show a bit of a backward attitude towards design and completely lack any social networking activity (beside some marginal and self contained Facebook and Twitter accounts). Like nothing had happened in last 10 years or so. But it did. The core of the internet use had changed – but you can’t see that in those e-literature magazines (i.e. in their form and interaction possibilities).
Shouldn’t they be the cutting edge of the current internet affairs? Also form wise – as much the form is the content (or at least part of it)? Where is a dialog with the geek developers? Designers? Information architects? E-literature evangelists and PR people (have you seen one outside the closed e-literature circle)? And all those people?
Is it really all about the text in e-literature? Or it should be part of today’s alpha web development? I don’t think it is. Some authors and others involved might be – but in general? And to all those literature fans out there – are they (we) at least trying to reach them? Is this an author’s problem? Or is there a lack of promoters in e-literature? Not in university – out there where the cut-out-of-our-communications-readers are?
There was some mentioning of e-literature being dead. I could not disagree more but then – are we really talking to the people or just among ourselves?
Am I wrong about this – please let me know in the comments, I would love to read your take on this.
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8 Responses to “E-literature magazines are not dead – they just move slowly”.
A few points:
As Alan and Davin and myself have pointed out many times, E-Lit has incredibly potential, in terms of audience and reach and publishing. The problem, I suppose some down to us not them. My reason for creating this wee portal was to do something. To offer one venue, among hopefully many venues to share our works and words.
So I suppose, I would say, in repsonse, that if journals and publciations move too slowly or are not designed well..etc…then create your own…or team up with others…
yes it does take time….but it’s well worth it….
And as for universities…I like them…..they are usually good environments…that offer stable jobs to semi-stable creative types….and they seem to be interested in spreading our work to new readers/students….of course we can’t limit ourselves to them…but we should do more in all areas….
Hi Jaka,
I think starting a new e-lit mag that’s plugged into the latest developments in social media and content delivery is a great idea. Maybe a worthy MA project? I’d love to participate if you want to get it going.
Tia
It does seem that most of the e-lit journals/portals emanate from academia in one way or another and the reason may be that e-lit authors who are also academics are particularly good at discussing and writing about e-literature, which, as far as I understand it (I don’t work in academia), is part of the academic job. I’m certainly very thankful that they have the energy, commitment and interest to do so (and big thanks for starting netpoetic!) but it would be great to see more e-lit authors and readers beyond academia joining in the discussion and promoting/disseminating their own and others work.
I agree, we should do more in all areas and it really is up to us – until there’s money to be made (ha! as if…) who else is going to do it?
Rhizome.org does a good job of collecting current works and providing reasonably up-to-date commentary. It doesn’t always do what I want it to do, but that is more a result of the particular kind of community they have created there.
The problem, as I see it, is that you have a lot of people building infrastructure out of a sense of duty to electronic literature. These people work when they want to and when they can… and so you cannot always count on seeing something new every time you click on the bookmark.
What it takes is the right mix of tendencies. A critical mass of artists is needed to furnish the work. A critical mass of theorists is needed to provide provocative conversations. A critical mass of readers is needed to provide the actual community that necessitates the continual work of adding and commenting–in fact, this community is what takes the work away from being work and makes it into something pleasurable, that mix of building our community while maintaining our own little purpose within that community.
On the other hand, and this is where we have something up on a more established community, is that we are smaller and a little bit further from the mainstream of art/theory. People who post on this site, while it might be good for us because it helps us talk about something we love, it does not make money or get us jobs. The self-promotion that happens here is not for the sake of our promotion within some established institutional setting, rather we are trying to “promote” (really, share) our selves with a community of people that cares about something special. This kind of motivation, a motivation towards each other, is especially potent for building the kind of community that people will continue to nourish.
What is comes down to is that WE need to make the community. We need to put work up. We need to discuss it. We need to encourage people who come here primarily as readers to find ways to help construct this community.
So far, I think this has been the cleverness of Jason’s thinking… to build the interface, to invite people to contribute, and to try to establish the conditions necessary for the emergence of an social system. If participation in Netpoetic continues to grow at the current level, I think it will develop to the point where participation will seem natural to people who like electronic literature. And, eventually, we won’t have to “put” anything in. Rather, generative thinking, from conceptual birth to death, will happen within this little world.
Of course, I don’t want a stasis to develop… my thinking is pandemic…. Once we get this host organism rocking… the next step is expansion, to sneeze. So that people who have no idea what electronic literature is will have fevered visions of words that wobble. Maybe, they shook my hand, didn’t wash it, and then picked their nose… the next thing you know, they are typing in URLs they’ve never heard of before… reading books with no binding…
would anyone be willing to post a list of these e-lit journals? unless it’s already been posted and I missed it…I have my eye vaguely on a few but I depend on the journals themselves to get the word out and for the word to reach me.
This is an interesting problem. I think much of it has to do with what people within the e-lit community recognize as e-lit — a lot of the advance guard in text art on the web, using 2.0 technologies, don’t seem to be recognized as such. This seems to be a _pre-critical_ response — it has something to do with the taste and smell of the works and where they came from, rather than the works themselves.
So you could do fabulous text-based art but it won’t be called e-lit because it’s not from a recognized author, comes from someone who’s had no contact with the community, or doesn’t use some of the recognized tropes of e-lit, such as hypertext or the animation of letters. This is actually a pretty useful defensive posture, since it’s hard enough to divorce what was is called”net art” or “digital at” (or video and audio art, or video games) from something that could be called “e-lit.”
The academic issue is interesting here too since obviously each department would want to have their czar of digital culture as it relates to an established discipline — why have an e-lit person if text-based digital art is already being covered in another department? But I think there is a huge necessity for a frame for something called “digital literature” or what have you; we just shouldn’t be surprised if the objects or phenomenon that are classed under this category are not self-contained units of creative activity, like a Flash app. It might resemble more something out (for example) the Vito Acconci school of text-art — “words to cover a screen.”
I’m actually quite surprised that more critical material about digital literature does not actually acknowledge any other artistic genre — such as the traditions of sound art, graphic design, conceptual art, etc. — when describing the works. It seems quite obvious to me that you can’t adequately describe — even basic description is useful here — a work of digital literature without being able to hone in on all the visual, audio, and interactive elements and their respective traditions. That is, indeed, a lot to ask of a scholar, but it’s the direction it should go.
There is a potential market ready-made for elit, and that is in traditional print journals. Some are already starting to publish elit, and once they start to do it regularly, others will follow….
Jason has proposed for a while now that we try to interest these journals in what we do. This kind of pro-active approach toward self-publishing (and promoting of special issues devoted to elit examples of others), is one useful way to go. By reaching out to these journals, who often have no idea of what we do, we can educate them as to the current state of elit, and offer our services to help them curate selections/collections for their upcoming issues.
Lot’s of thoughts here. First: I like the academic world (currently I’m on a MA course in creative writing and new media). And I have huge respect for all e-lit initiatives. I’m just surprised by a lack of current web development in e-lit magazines (not blogs) and their disregards of outsiders (rarely one would provide information on e-lit for a newcomer).
@tia – I been editor of online part of major Slovene magazine for 8 years. It takes a lot of time and work to make a (online) magazine. And for me (in Slovenia) is next to impossible to get some grants to cover at least basic expenses – payments to authors is just impossible and there is not nearly enough interest in advertising to fill in the financial minus …
@lori – I’ll try to make a post with links in next days
+ a mess of digital content and continuum of analogue – digital – analogue – digital – analogue of the same content is highly complex (think of a book publishing process for example and add an e-book(pdf) version of the book in online bookstore). Personally I use the level of computation in content display/manipulation to distinguish computer based digital content from the content that just happens to be digital. But that is just a medium aspect. Hypertext can be done in a book, no problem (Cybertext by E. J. Aarseth is a really good read on this). Currently I’m most interested in connection of (historical) net art and e-literature, but I should just write a post on it I guess
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