New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. * Adalaide Morris and Thomas Swiss (eds).

Abstract

New Media Poetics is an interesting volume for readers who are studying digital writing, reading, hypertext, poetry on the web, and new media art. Although there are a number of well-written and researched chapters in this book, there are also a number of dubious chapters that read as marketing pieces for the authors’ various new media projects. There are multiple perspectives in this anthology and some provide more valuable insight while others offer a subjective point of view quite distant from a well-researched and objective academic study. Overall, the good chapters within this book make it a worthwhile read for students and researchers interested in the subject of new media poetics. New media poetics, as defined by Adalaide Morris in the opening chapter, ‘includes a wide variety of configurations of language, image, and sound produced, distributed, archived, accessed, and/or assimilated on computers’ (p. 7). The discussions within this book therefore extend beyond the hypertext theorizing of the late 1990s; Morris contrasts digital poetry with the hypertext narrative that normally depends on lexia or blocks of semi-autonomous text joined by links into various configurations. The digital poem is also contrasted with computer games and interactive fiction in that it does not usually depend on a combination of rules, a simulated game world, or traditions of game playing. Although these contrasts are important for defining new media, some may appear a bit forced; for example, when contrasting the digital poem with the print poem Morris states that ‘unlike traditional print poetry, finally, new media poems are not often lineated or rhymed, do not necessarily maintain stable or consistent configurations, and seem by nature to bend—if not break—the founding constraints of the lyric as violently as hypermedia, computer games, and interactive fiction bend or break the constraints of narrative’ (p. 7). One might wonder if many works of new media poetry are created only to reflect on the medium (or how it differs from its predecessors) and, in this respect, will only be one subset of a passing phase in discussions of poetry. In other words, at this point in time digital and online media are still relatively new, although we can see signs of new media becoming more ubiquitous and therefore less foregrounded in the attention of writers working with digital media. As digital media incorporate even more seamlessly into our everyday interaction with the world this fetishizing of the medium and contrasting of its conventions with print may subside. There are acknowledgements of this coming of age in our relation to the digital medium even within this anthology: in Morris’ chapter—‘If early hypertext theory overestimated the electronic reader's agency, it underplayed the complexity, energy, and undecidability of print’ (p. 13)— and in Katherine Hayles’ assertion that ‘it would be more accurate to call a digital text a process rather than an object, an attribute I highlight by referring to the time of performance for an electronic text versus the time of production for print’ (p. 185, emphasis in original). This movement to study texts as a ‘performance’, whether digital or print, has also been occurring in book history and print culture studies in general that look at the processes surrounding the production of texts rather than just their archived state on the page. In other words, the movement to focus on the materiality of the text has also helped us to reflect on the processes surrounding the material production of print texts. Morris also points to the distinction between first-generation and second-generation electronic literature and the different critical approaches used when encountering these different time-periods of theorizing on digital literature—critics initially used terms from analyses of narrative classics but then moved from narrative to poetic models by using strategies developed to read the texts of avant-garde or experimentalist poets. This shift from analyses to strategies also highlights the shift from seeing a digital text as a product to seeing it as a process—‘an ongoing, elastic, capacious process rather than a taxonomically precise product: as benefits the processual or process-driven nature of computers’ (p. 7). Part of what this anthology hopes to do, it seems, is to draw a distinction between the hypertext poetry and theorizing of the 1990s and the poetry made post-1995 with DHTML, JavaScript, Java, QuickTime, Macromedia Flash, Shockwave, and other programs that ‘go beyond the plot-driven verbal lexia of Storyspace’ (p. 14).