Multimedia Writing Post 3

In examining Aarseth's introduction to ergodic literature I suddenly had a realization, an understanding, an epiphany. I don't know exactly what the proper term is but I had it.

It seems that after reading and 'knowing' the information that I've studied about the mind as a writing space I had really only gained a vague idea of what that meant. As Dr. Bradley would say, I knew what it was about, but had no clue what it meant. There is a paragraph in Aarseth's introduction which elucidates a central point in hypermediated literature theory (as far as I understand it) in such a way that it unravels a tangled mesh that I had thus far failed to recognize as my own mind. Up to that point in time, I had only managed to connect the mind as a writing space in relation to the hypermediated reading I personally encounter daily (news, myspace, facebook, blogs, wikis etc.). My failure was that I did not recognize the overlap of narrative literature and cyborg theory.

The study of cybertexts reveals the misprision of the spaciodynamic metaphors of narrative theory, because ergodic literature incarnates these models in a way linear text narratives do not. This may e hard to understand for the traditional literary critic who cannot perceive the difference between metaphorical structure and logical structure, but it is essential. The cybertext reader is a player, a gambler; the cybertext is a game-world or world-game; it is possible to explore, get lost, and discover secret paths in these texts, not metaphorically, but through the topographical structures of the textual machinery. This is not a difference between games and literature but rather between games and narratives. To claim that there is no difference between games and narratives is to ignore essential qualities of both categories. And yet, as this study tires to show, the difference is not clear cut, and there is significant overlap between the two.

In reading a hypermediated 'narrative', I would not depend upon the original author to calculate my response, or my understanding of the work. Unlike the traditional, linear narrative form I would be a participant the work itself. In this way hypermedia is like the almanac. It may be distributed uniformly, but the piece becomes unique unto its reader. When I read a hypermediated narrative, my personal narration is unbound from the chains of the traditional static page and given navigational freedom. In fact, the reading of that piece would depend on my navigation in such a way that I must meld my mind with the machine in order to create a working narrative.

The substance of the narrative is like liquid mercury. Alone, it will not guide itself into a shape, but when my thoughts interplay with the narrative they work as a mold which illuminates the narrative as a specific, unique work. Alone, neither will produce a final narrative, but together, the mind and the machine will construct a work that is specific to me. I have become the author in this sense because the original author has allowed, neigh, forced me to inculcate my own thought process into the development of this narrative. We share a work which serves genuine purpose for me, the reader, but it's purpose is not uniform since I, being a thoughtful human being, can remediate this narrative thereby creating a new purpose and still preserve the 'original' in my hard drive, a place also known as the mind.