Once Upon a Time My Horizons of Literature Expanded
Signing up for a class in digital literature, I thought it was an easy way out of a despised poetry class. How naive of me. Little did I know that I was walking into a lecture theatre which expanded past the four walls of the room into the terrifying expanse of ‘digital’ and ‘online’. Entering the wilderness of unknown territory, where the concepts were foreign and the language illegible, I was about to experience a whole new world.
Let us go back to a time when I was first introduced to books. I was read to from the moment I was born (according to Mum) and one of my earliest memories is standing in front of my kiddy bookshelf, pulling a book down, and demanding my Dad to read it to me. This reading ritual continued until I deemed myself enough of a big girl to read by myself and check my own books at the library. Fast forward to my first year of University when books revealed their true price and my bank account cried, I decided to branch out to eBooks and free PDFs. Reading them on my phone, I missed the musty old paper smell and the dog ears of readers come before. So, you can imagine my reaction when I was presented with digital texts.
Pry my first taste of digital literature, opened me up to the scary thought that parts of a digital text can be missed by its reader. What was this? By pinching the screen at the wrong (or was it right?) time, I could miss part of the narrative. This was my first taste of the fear of missing out; a 21st Century condition that the youth have contracted, commonly known as FOMO. Thrown into this uncomfortable motion of digital literature, I could only go forwards… or backwards or sideways or on a cyclical never-ending loop. My next scary encounter was web-based fiction, specifically hypertext fiction. Clicking on a hyperlink and being transported from inside the narrative to a completely different web-page challenged my already short attention span. But somehow, maybe due to my acclimation into this new world of literature, I managed to acknowledge how this networked narrative added to the story. Next came digital poetry, interactive fiction, the idea of video games having a narrative; each new type of literature presented me with a new hurdle to jump before reaching the ribbon of acceptance.
Will my cell phone or laptop replace the book in my hands before bedtime? Probably not. But I no longer feel discomfort at the thought of reading a text on a digital medium. I have learnt to enjoy the challenge of hyperlinks and the uncertainty of networked texts. As though each lecture was a new node, I have completed this digital text called ENGL 342 and reached ‘the end’.
Literature is not bound by a paper medium. Literature is enhanced by new digital technology. Digital literature is the way forwards.
