Literature and Social Media

Bronwen Thomas

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000025859
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

From Instapoetry to BookTube, contemporary literary cultures and practices are increasingly intertwined with social media. In this lively and wide-ranging study, Bronwen Thomas explores how social media provides new ways of connecting with and rediscovering established literary works and authors while also facilitating the emergence of unique and distinctive forms of creative expression. The book takes a 360? approach to the subject, combining analysis of current forms and practices with an examination of how social media fosters ongoing collaborative discourse amongst both informal and formal literary networks, and demonstrating how the participatory practices of social media have the potential to radically transform how literature is produced, shared and circulated. The first study of its kind to focus specifically on social media, Literature and Social Media provides a timely and engaging account of the state of the art, while interrogating the rhetoric that so often accompanies discussion of the 'new' in this context.

1 From the Holodeck to the Tweetdeck: electronic literature, interactivity and participation

As discussed in the Introduction, writers have always been fascinated by the emergence and impact of new technologies, and in the next chapter I will consider how this has sometimes involved attempting to recreate or remediate the affordances of new media and forms of communication within the existing parameters of traditional print-based literary genres. In this chapter I will explore how, from the 1980s onwards, writers and artists have created literary works that depend on computer technologies for their very existence, in order to better understand the specific ways in which literary outputs on social media have evolved both as a response to, and reaction against, some of those earlier experiments.

The ‘End of Books’?

The increased affordability and usability of the ‘home’ computer in the 1980s led to the emergence of ‘electronic’ literature, defined by Rettberg (2018: 203) as writing created by or on computers which responds to the affordances of new technologies and is characterised by a ‘sense of play and wonder’. In particular, a form of fiction utilising hyperlinks came to prominence, raising questions about the new possibilities for interactive storytelling, and leading to often apocalyptic predictions about the imminent ‘End of Books’ (Coover 1992). Most notably, in The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in and Electronic Age, Birkerts (1994) confronted the possibility of the displacement of the page by the screen to the detriment of ‘the stable hierarchies of the printed page’ (3) and asked whether the triumph of the digital meant the inevitable alteration of the ‘“feel” of literary engagement’ (6). Although Birkerts does express optimism that ‘literature [will] be able to prove the reports of its death exaggerated’ (197), he can only conceive of this in terms of a need to seek out ‘the word on the page’ (197) and return to the book as a ‘haven’ from the digital. In the 1980s these fears about the end of books focused not so much on the threat posed by alternative delivery systems for literature (as would emerge later with the advent of ereaders), but on the changing roles of authors and readers, and on the ways in which interactive fiction in particular seemed to challenge the idea of the book as a stable, fixed object with clear beginnings, middles and ends, or recognisable characters, plots and settings.

Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck (1997) offered one of the most enthusiastic responses to the new possibilities afforded by computer technologies, exploring continuities with existing literary traditions and celebrating the increased opportunities for participation that these technologies offered, as well as drawing links and parallels with games and other media texts (Murray’s title alludes to an episode of the US tv show Star Trek). In response to these new possibilities, Murray and others developed a whole new cultural metalanguage (Manovich 2001) for talking about narrative structure and the role of the reader. Metaphors for narrative structure emerged based on the idea of the text as a maze, offering multiple pathways for the reader to navigate. Moreover, Murray’s study relied heavily on the language of performance and simulation, highlighting how the computer facilitated the generation of new fantastical and immersive worlds that users could both play in and with. Murray and Birkerts became closely identified with the debates around digital literature and storytelling during this period, at one point in 1997 taking part in a head to head ‘brain tennis’ session at MIT. In 2017, The New Yorker published an article on Murray’s book ‘Twenty Years Later’, highlighting how the book had foretold many of the innovations we now take for granted. But more importantly, perhaps, it argues that her book showed us that ‘the digital moment must be understood as an extension of history, rather than a new beginning or a terrible end’ and that ‘digital space must be understood as deeply enmeshed in the existing cultural terrain’ (Margini 2017).

Defining the field

To this day, discussion continues about how to define and what to call the field of study for emerging forms of literature which rely for their very existence on computer technologies or the digital. Rettberg (2018) recalls some of these debates in Electronic Literature, where he attempts to provide a typology of the main genres. He provides some interesting insights into what motivates writers to experiment with a new medium, suggesting that this is prompted by a need to explore ‘How do I write in it?’ while for readers the key question is ‘How do I read it?’ But he further argues that electronic literature is not just about playing with the possibilities of new media or interfaces, providing as it does interventions into debates about contemporary literature more broadly by defamiliarising its practices and providing the criticial distance necessary to understand and evaluate its contribution and value. For Rettberg, therefore, electronic literature’s influences and antecedents are modernism and postmodernism, Dadaism and surrealism, not popular cultural or contemporary media and transmedia practices.

In his study, Rettberg considers whether we should talk of electronic literature in terms of projects rather than works, to convey that they may never reach a state of fixity or completion, as well as the fact that they may be accessed across different platforms or ‘venues’ (2018: 7). He further suggests that the concept of genre is especially useful in this context for establishing frames of reference for grouping together artefacts and practices as well as offering audiences a sense of ‘how to read’. While Rettberg avoids referring to technology as a determining factor in terms of identifying the genres of electronic literature, he argues that an understanding of the ‘capabilities and limitations of systems, platforms, and software’ (11) are essential to their understanding. This is particularly true for the ‘combinatory poetics’ which Rettberg traces back to experimental writing traditions including Surrealist automatic writing and the works (or projects?) of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle). In relation to social media, the influence of these movements is most obvious in computer-generated poetry and work which uses algorithms and bots for creative play (discussed in Chapters 2 and 3) as well as more broadly, as Rettberg recognises, in terms of focusing on the ‘potential’ of the literary as an ongoing and shared process.

Another key question raised by these new kinds of electronic literatures was precisely what the object of study would be. Thus concepts such as that of the page seemed to require redefining in the context of web pages that are dynamic and continually refreshed, while the idea of closure became problematic where texts had no clear or agreed sense of an ending. Lovell (2019: 80) has coined the term ‘session-length promise’ to refer to the ways in which content providers in the digital realm need to search for ways to signal to users how long they need to commit to a piece in any one session: in a traditional novel this is more straightforwardly a chapter, in games a level, and on tv an episode. One of the challenges for readers of digital and interactive fiction is that there often is no such sense of what constitutes a session, in addition to difficulties with starting again from where they left off and rereading (Thomas 2007b). For writers of electronic literature, meanwhile, the problems of defining the literary object or text manifest in pressing and practical issues related to intellectual property and monetising content.

The Brave New World of hypertext fiction

Ted Nelson’s development of the concept of hypertext as a branching and responding text read on a computer screen (Barnet 2018) helped generate a whole new kind of labyrinthine writing often traced back to the literary experiments of Jorge Luis Borges. Indeed, like Borges’s fictional ‘Library of Babel’, Nelson’s earlier vision of Project Xanadu had sought to create a computer filing system capable of storing and delivering the great body of literature, and to make it possible for readers to annotate, link and compare documents with ease (Barnet 2018).

In addition to revolutionising writing, the emergence of hypertext fiction in the 1980s led to scrutiny of the act of reading. Not only was it impossible to fix on an agreed version of what a reading of any of these texts might look like, but the ways in which they were accessed might vary, for example whether on floppy disk or CD Rom, on a PC or a Mac. Reading or ‘wreading’ thus came to be conceived as a potentially creative and liberatory practice, much as the term ‘prosumer’ has become commonplace in discussion of online spaces and social media. Whereas critics such as Landow (1992) celebrated the unique pleasures and satisfactions of these kinds of writing, nevertheless questions of coherence and quality recurred, perhaps because of the tendency of these ‘first wave’ (Bell, Ensslin and Rustad 2014) theorists to constantly compare the digital to print. Studies of these new forms of literature and the computer as a ‘writing space’ (Bolter 2001) furthermore tended to dwell on the ‘problems’ they pose for long held ideals of high culture as a unifying force, and for any shared concept of a literary canon.

Electronic literature has long had to contend with issues around discoverability. Unlike print books, whose covers and front and back matter can contain marketing materials in the form of endorsements or striking images, even in floppy disk or CD Rom formats, packaging for hypertext fictions was relatively uninspiring. Although some hypertext fictions have been anthologised in print and so have been marketed as books and can be found in bookshops, this is the exception rather than norm. Outside of the word of mouth within the academic and artistic communities, therefore, it can be difficult for anyone interested in exploring electronic literature to know where to start.

Nevertheless, texts from this period have been canonized (Ensslin 2007) and given validity by various cultural intermediaries. Many of the key producers of hypertext fiction – in particular Michael Joyce and Jane Yellowlees Douglas – were also among its most visible theorists and critics. Concerned more with formal innovation than engagement with readers, these writers positioned themselves very much in the experimental, avant-garde tradition. For example, Michael Joyce often referred to himself playfully as the ‘lesser Joyce’, and his works share the modernists’ predilection for the reworking of classical myths. Likewise, much ‘first wave’ criticism and theory drew heavily on structuralist and poststructuralist theory in attempting to think through the implications of these new forms.

A select group of hypertext writers enjoyed the security and patronage of Eastgate, an online publisher. Eastgate’s Storyspace ‘environment’ was both developed and widely used by hypertext writers, but additionally acted as a kind of guarantor of quality, presenting itself as ‘the primary source for serious hypertext’ [my emphasis]. Eastgate was also an unashamedly commercial venture, ensuring that writers would benefit financially from their ventures by charging consumers for accessing content. Whether we see Eastgate as the catalyst of an emerging literary movement or as a barrier to access perhaps needs to be considered historically. Nevertheless, it is true to say that most of the high-profile proponents of hypertext fiction were academics or academic affiliated writers based in North America.

For some critics of hypertext fiction (e.g. Miller 1998; Mangen and van der Weel 2015), one of the main problems was that very few people actually wanted to read it. Despite the much vaunted claims of interactivity, little evidence has emerged of the creators of these fictions ever interacting with actual readers in any meaningful sense. Thus critics such as Hammond (2016: 155) seem to revel in the fact that hypertext fiction ‘is one of the few digital literary forms that can be plausibly regarded as dead’, and he claims its only true legacy is theoretical. Nevertheless, in addition to prompting increased debate about literary reading, literary texts, narratorial control and literariness itself, many hypertext fictions have become key texts in provoking discussion of the posthuman, embodiment and the complex forms of ‘intermediation’ between the medium of the body and other media (Hayles 2008). For example, Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl (1995), in which the reader navigates the narrative via the various body parts of the Frankensteinian central character, has been celebrated for the ways in which it ‘explores the gendered body as the site of complex transactions and intermediation’ (Goody 2011: 163). Moreover, hypertext fictions such as Jackson’s help show how the new technologies of the computer and the internet require us to rethink concepts around identity and selfhood discussed in the Introduction, where the stability and reliability of memory is constantly being challenged, and where the idea of self as part of a network or system means that we are constantly reassessing our impressions of character and their interrelations.

Beyond hypertext and the impact of Web 2.0

In addition to an online publisher, electronic literature has its own journal, association and conference, as well as its own online collection aiming to help users locate the ‘good stuff’ (Hayles 2008: 40). Meanwhile ‘New Media Writing’ now has its own annual international prize (www.newmediawritingprize.co.uk), while ‘interactive fiction’ makes hypertext more user-friendly with open-source tools such as Twine (www.twinery.org) and Genarrator (www.genarrator.org) making it possible for writers to explore and play with nonlinear storytelling without having to grapple with (or pay for) the more established Storyspace. Nevertheless, some thirty years after the heyday of hypertext fiction, the search for an audience continues: in 2017 the writing competition Opening Up Digital Fiction (https://readingdigitalfiction.com/writing-competition/) set out to disseminate ‘popular’ and ‘mainstream’ interactive fiction to a ‘broader segment of the public’.

Netprov or networked improvised literature provides a variant of electronic literature closely associated with social media because of its greater focus on collaboration and participation. As practised by Rob Wittig and Mark Marino, this kind of writing sets out to experiment with the ways in which ‘social media can function as an environment and stage for new kinds of participatory performance’ (Rettberg 2018: 175), as in the piece Grace, Wit & Charm (2012), which blends Twitter and live theatre, and I Work for the Web (2015), a satirical piece exposing ‘the absurdities of common behaviours on social media’ (Rettberg 2018: 178). Rettberg’s account of Netprov links it with writing prompts and games, and he describes it as a structured form of collective writing. Nevertheless, while Netprov does allow for more active engagement from users than some other forms of electronic literature, it remains true that the artistic and creative conception of the piece is still very much under the control of the lead writers.

Often left out of discussions of electronic literature from this period, the work of Judy Malloy on social media practice dates back to 1986 and involves what Malloy calls an aleatoric process of slowly releasing fragments online, until the whole is completed. Malloy’s Uncle Roger has been painstakingly preserved and reproduced in various formats, including Malloy’s own ‘Narrabase’ (1991). Digital pioneers such as Malloy and Howard Rheingold (discussed further in Chapter 5) have provided fascinating insights into the emergence of distinctive communities of practice around new media writing and art, and corrective histories to the lazy description of emerging forms as new or unprecedented. For example, Rheingold’s (2017) enthusiastic account of Netprov points to improvised storytelling on earlier platforms, such as Usenet and Compuserve, and to collaborative projects such as Invisible Seattle (1983) which commissioned ‘literary construction workers’ to go out into the city to find contributors.

Nevertheless, electronic literature remains closely associated with nonlinear texts that foreground the activity and agency of the reader. Both the theory and practice of electronic literature also demonstrate a close connection with performance and gaming. For example, Ensslin’s (2014) work situates itself on a ‘literary-ludic spectrum’, arguing both for the literariness of some videogames and for the game-like qualities of digital fictions. Although electronic literature is now about much more than words and text, a strong focus on language and formal experimentation persists.

Creators of hypertext fiction and early forms of electronic literature not only perceived themselves to be in the vanguard of experimentation with literary form, but also had to be technically proficient, understanding code and software as well as the commercial imperatives affecting the distribution and uptake of their works. Novelistic representations of computers and communication technologies from the same period primarily portrayed them as mechanistic or alienating, a threat to culture and civilisation, or as the trigger for comic scenes based on the ineptitude of users (Thomas 2012). By the end of the twentieth century, however, there is undoubtedly a growing sense of inevitability about the role of technology in the production and consumption of literary texts, with computers becoming less of a curiosity and more of a necessity for writers. Interviewed in 2000, Martin Amis admitted to relying more and more on his computer, despite describing this shift as ‘sinister’, and bemoaning the loss of the ‘slightly painterly feel’ of writing in longhand (Richards 2000). At the beginning of the twenty-first century and with the arrival of Web 2.0, technology became much more user friendly, facilitating greater openness and access both in terms of the consumption and production of cultural content online.

Whereas in the 1980s when hypertext fiction was at its peak, computers would mainly have been accessed in the workplace, as the technology advanced and devices for accessing the internet became more portable, the technology and associated practices become much more embedded in people’s daily routines.

Web 2.0 brought more opportunities for users to customise and personalise content, making the choices that seemed so revolutionary in hypertext fiction look positively restricted and simplistic. As Barry (2018: 68) puts it, with Web 2.0 the net exists ‘less to provide static pages for users to consume, and more to allow those users to actively intervene in adding music, video, opinion, and information of their own’. This had implications, too, for the literary, since as Hammond (2016: 175) notes ‘As the computer has transitioned from a device capable of transmitting only numbers and text to one able to carry multiple modalities, it has increasingly brought into question the notion of “literariness”’. However, it is important to remember once aga...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Note
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Introduction
• 1. From the Holodeck to the Tweetdeck: electronic literature, interactivity and participation
• 2. Old wine in new bottles? Retelling and reimagining the literary with social media
• 3. The Twittersphere as literary playground
• 4. Canons and curators: accessing, preserving and evaluating the literary on social media
• 5. Literary movements in the network era
• 6. New literary cultures and markets
• Afterword
• Glossary
• References
• Index