Literature in a Wired World

It’s late. You’re not working on your final project. You’re surfing the web aimlessly.

But then, up ahead, you see the neon glow of a VACANCY sign. It’s Hotel 626. Why not check in? You may even be able to check out.

Hotel 626 is an “advergame.” Like The Lucky Ones, it’s an online diversion that’s trying to get you to buy a product. Like The Lucky Ones, the connection between the game and the product may be hard to see. But the game itself is fascinating, moody, and intense.

And as the name suggests, it can only be played from 6pm to 6am. So if you want to play it during the day, you’ll need to change your computer’s internal clock.

I mentioned in class a story about a team-writing assignment that went horribly, horribly wrong (kinda like A Million Penguins).

Here’s the link to that story, and Snopes shows us that it might even be true!

http://www.snopes.com/college/homework/writing.asp

Daniel Keyes’ classic short story “Flowers for Algernon,” later made into the tearjerker film Charly, is now a blog! Which makes me wonder whether the blog format isn’t going to help revive the epistolary narrative.

A while back Japanese animators SamBakZa created a cute video about a lovestruck bunny and the feline object of her affection: “There She Is.” Then SamBakZa ran out of funding, and the rest of the projected 5-part series languished. Well, SamBakZa is back with the necessary funds to finish the story, and I’m really glad they are. The story of Doki and Nabi begins lightheartedly but becomes deeply profound and touching. It also rewards rewatching the earlier episodes.

We don’t have the final installment yet, but I can’t wait to see what happens.

In Japan (and perhaps soon elsewhere) novels written and then read on cell phones’ tiny screens are huge. Read about it:

• Charles Muir at Core Brand
• Peter Brantley at O’Reilly Radar
• Yukari Iwatani Kane at the Wall Street Journal

As you may have heard, Google surprised a heck of a lot of people earlier this week when they announced that they had created a new Web browser: Chrome.

Right now, Chrome is PC-only, and it is pretty sincerely still in beta. It’s incredibly fast at rendering large amounts of data, once you’ve downloaded that data. (Which means that no matter how blindingly fast Chrome may be, you’ll still be limited by your connection speed and by the response speed of the server hosting the page you’re visiting.)

It’s also not particularly good with all Web pages. I’ve already found a few pages that it simply won’t load for me, which is sad. And it seems really wretched with Flash applications and games, but I hope these will be addressed by a later plug-in or build.

But what’s really interesting to me is that Google decided to make their announcement via a comic book.

For those of you familiar with Understanding Comics or Reinventing Comics or Making Comics, you’ll recognize the work of Scott McCloud immediately. The comic does a pretty good job of visualizing the sometimes staggeringly dense and geeky details Google so desperately wants us to nerdgasm over.

To me, the choice of using graphic narrative like this suggests that Google wants to appeal to a wider audience than merely the bleeding-edge tech crowd who will download and install anything if it’s new and shiny, and for whom the phrase “multi-process rendering” actually means something. They’re trying to make this appealing and at least marginally understandable to the entire Web-browsing world.

But I don’t think they’re trying too hard to reach this second, larger group of people. Not yet. The tech-speak and details about Chrome are just too densely packed into the comic for that. Instead, and I think this is smart, they’re targeting the early adopters and will wait for the trickle-down effect of coolness to reach the rest of the world. And by that time, maybe they will have worked some of the larger bugs out.

(X-posted to Digital Digressions)

To get us in the mood, we’re going to start the course with a little writing.

Compose a comment to this post in which you answer the question: What is “literature”? Your comment should only be about 1 paragraph long, so you’ll have to be brief.

Also, where the comment box asks for your name, just put your initials. We’ll talk about why I want you to do that later in the class.

Codex, by Lev Grossman
Due: IN CLASS October 3rd

“See, I’m a 21st century digital boy,
I don’t know how to read but I got a lot of toys.
My Daddy’s a lazy middle-class intellectual,
My Mommy’s on valium, so ineffectual.
Ain’t life a mystery?”
Bad Religion – “21st Century Digital Boy”

Pick one of the following topics:

TOPIC ALPHA:

In a way it was idiotic. He was treating these books like they were holy relics. It wasn’t like he would ever actually read them. But there was something magnetic about them, something that compelled respect, even the silly ones, like the enlightenment treatise about how lightning was caused by bees. They were information, data, but not in the form he was used to dealing with it. They were non-digital, nonelectrical chunks of memory, not stamped out of silicon but laboriously crafted out of wood pulp and ink, leather and glue. Somebody had cared enough to write these things; somebody else had cared enough to buy them, possibly even read them, at the very least keep them safe for 150 years, sometimes longer, when they could have vanished at the touch of a spark. That made them worth something, didn’t it, just by itself? (57)

Well? Does “that” make them “worth something … just by itself”? Agree or disagree and explain your reasoning.

TOPIC BETA:

At first Edward thought he was looking at a photograph, frozen and digitized. The scene was strikingly realistic. It was like looking through a window into another world. The light was green, and there were trees around him, a grove of slender birches and aspens with sunlight falling between them. A light breeze ruffled their tiny leaves. Beyond the delicate scrim of trees was open air and green grass. (46-47)

There was something weird about the game. The images moved perfectly smoothly, with no cartoonish jumping or stuttering. The colors were drawn from an intense, hyperreal palette, like a green landscape seconds before a thunderstorm, and the level of detail was impossibly fine. Focusing in on a nearby branch, he saw that one leaf on it had a tiny, irregular half circle nibbled out of one of its edges. It was less like a movie than an old master painting come to life. (47)

When did he finally go to bed? God, he was no better than Stewart and his GameBoy. (50)

Well? Is Edward “no better than Stewart and his GameBoy”? Agree or disagree and explain your reasoning.

Here’s an interesting new graphic narrative I just came across: Shooting War, by Anthony Lappe and Dan Goldman.

Set in a future in which John McCain is president and the war in Iraq continues to grind on, this one isn’t for kids.

Online now is the first part of a longer book that will be published in hardcover next year. Somehow, I think that will have a very different feel than these parts do online.

As always, check it out.