![]() As a consequence, the students were not only required to read closely but also to analyze the narrative strategies Jackson uses to construct her text. Introduced in the late 1980s, Storyspace was original created for Macintosh computers only, though later introduced Windows versions. Smith, which allows users to create hypertext environments of fiction and non-fiction. Finally, I asked them to diagram interrelations between lexias, drawing on all three views that the Storyspace software enables. Storyspace is proprietary software, created by authorsJay David Bolter, Michael Joyce, and John B. ![]() I divided them into teams and assigned a section of Jackson’s text to each team, telling them that I wanted them to discover all the lexias (i.e., blocks of digital text) in their section and warning them that the Storyspace software allows certain lexias to be hidden until others are read. They were shocked when I told them a reasonable time to spend with Jackson’s text was about the time it would take them to read Frankenstein, say, ten hours or so. Storyspace 2, the most important Storyspace update in 10 years, is now out for the Mac.It’s built on completely new code, is Power PC native, and Carbonized for Mac OS X. When it came to digital reading, however, they were accustomed to the scanning and fast skimming typical of hyper reading they therefore expected that it might take them, oh, half an hour to go through Jackson’s text. Since these were honors students, many of them had already read Frankenstein and were, moreover, practiced in close reading and literary analysis. “In teaching an honors writing class, I juxtaposed Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein with Shelley Jackson’s Patchwork Girl, an electronic hypertext fiction written in proprietary Storyspace software. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics Hence the definition’s strategic quality, strategic because it seeks to connect virtual technologies with the sense, pervasive in the late twentieth century, that all material objects are interpenetrated by flows of information, from DNA code to the global reach of the World Wide Web.” Virtual reality technologies are fascinating because they make visually immediate the perception that a world of information exists parallel to the “real” world, the former intersecting the latter at many points and in many ways. Thus the game takes place partly in real life (RL) and partly in virtual reality (VR). Instead of hitting a real ball, the player makes the appropriate motions with the paddle and watches the image of the ball on a computer monitor. ![]() For example, in virtual Ping-Pong, one swings a paddle wired into a computer, which calculates from the paddle’s momentum and position where the ball would go. Normally virtuality is associated with computer simulations that put the body into a feedback loop with a computer-generated image. The definition plays off the duality at the heart of the condition of virtuality-materiality on the one hand, information on the other. “Virtuality is the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |