Tag Archives: John Naughton

Digital Fictions and other Ephemeral Writings

About a dozen years ago I was teaching a course on analysing digital texts, those texts that can only be read on computers and that used the affordances of computer technology in their production.  The course included hypertext fiction, digital poetry and novels using adobe flash interface to tell their stories with words, images and music. Fascinating stuff.

I recall one of my luddite colleagues making an off-handed comment about the texts on my syllabus just being fads of technology and not real ‘literature.’ I admitted that there was some truth to that in the sense that technologies develop and change so quickly, other ways of writing creatively using new digital platforms are likely to come along. I shocked my colleague even more by saying that my course was likely to become superfluous in the coming years as digital texts become more common and would be studied alongside print books as part of courses on literature and critical studies. (That was me talking in a world that is ruthlessly territorial when it comes to who teaches what. I was always an odd fit in academia.)

In a recent interview, the British Library’s curator of digital publications, Giuilia Carla Rossi, noted that many ‘born-digital’ works, like the ones on my old course, are structurally and technically more complex than the pdfs and e-books we use today. These older publications – by that, I mean even eight years old – relied on the software and hardware they were designed for. With changes in computer technology, these works are no longer accessible. Painfully, that has been the case for a couple of the digital poems I used in my book Digital Textuality. These innovative multimodal poems were produced on Adobe Flash, which was discontinued in 2020.

Other texts analysed in my book have been rescued by digital archivists. The much-praised Patchwork Girl by Shelley Jackson first appeared in 2001 as a floppy disc (remember those?) with embedded specialist software. This hypertext fiction, where you can choose different paths to reading it, is a wonderful retelling of Frankenstein with a female monster. To read this work when I was teaching it, a CD driver was required. How many of us have computers with CD drivers in them these days? Luckily, thanks to digital archivists, Patchwork Girl is now available online as a download. This is because it was a seminal work in hypertext fiction. Other lesser-known works in this sub-genre have evaporated.

My prediction spoken to my colleague turned out to be too true, and many digital texts are now just texts. Digital Textuality only had one edition. But I don’t mind. Firstly, I managed to get a few articles and book chapters published on the back of this book. Secondly, these digital works and studies about them are not all that different from the many stage plays out there that are never recorded, and their scripts never published. As a former playwright, I’ve grown to accept that. Plays and their performances are re-experienced in our memories. Perhaps that makes me less clingy when it comes to digital texts and the short shelf life of my writing about them.

As I was taking a break from putting together this blog, I happen to read John Naughton’s latest column in The Observer, where he has coincidently taken up a similar topic. Naughton points out that we shouldn’t assume our stored digital data is going to be around forever. Not only is the technology changing in ways that make our digital artefacts inaccessible, but the companies that store these artefacts could go out of business, taking our data with them. WordPress, the platform for this blog, recognises the concern among its bloggers that our work might not last in perpetuity and has offered us a solution. For a fee of $38,000 WordPress will secure ‘your online legacy’ for 100 years.

Dear Reader, I’m afraid you’re going to have to treat this blog, like so many digital texts, as a fleeting thing, a mere transient writing of the moment.

Twitter, You’re Out!

This blog will appear in my last tweet. Ever. I mean it this time. I’m not particularly fond of baseball metaphors, but for me, Twitter has committed its third strike and is now out and should be sitting on the bench humiliated.

The first strike occurred during the Tr*mp presidency. If the orange one’s affectation for the social media platform weren’t enough to make someone want to quit, the twitterer-in-chief was making false claims about Covid. It took Twitter a dangerous while to start posting warnings that the tweets were medically untrue. The delay had to do with ‘freedom of speech,’ allowing anyone to say anything regardless of their position to influence. In the interest of public safety, Twitter finally gave in.

Strike two was made this summer, when Salma al-Shehab, a Saudi PhD student at the University of Leeds, was jailed by a Saudi terrorism court for 34 years for the ‘crime’ of following and retweeting a couple of Saudi social and feminist activists on Twitter. It was obvious that this dental hygienist was not a terrorist. In fact, it would be a stretch to even call her an activist. Not taking on any duty of care for its users, Twitter made no public statement on this. Many have speculated that this has to do with Mohammed Bin Salman’s sovereign wealth fund having an indirect stake in Twitter.

I really wanted to leave Twitter then and make a stand against the Saudi regime’s human rights abuses and the way they are buying democracies throughout the world to ignore their actions. I was in a right huff over it. But then, I selfishly thought about my writing being promoted on Twitter, along with my academic life and socio-political interests being shared on the site. To my shame, I chickened out. I remained on Twitter and spoke up for Salma al-Shehab by tweeting articles about her case and signing yet another Amnesty International petition and posting that on Twitter.

Strike three came about over these last few weeks. This is where the baseball metaphor falls apart as a strike of a bat is quick – perhaps it’s strike three in slow motion. Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter has seen three weeks of crashing chaos with the firing of staff, charging users for a special ‘blue’ status only to reverse it days later, and then reinstating Tr*mp to the platform. This last act in this vanity project was made worse by the way this was conducted. Musk held an online election, using Twitter, of course. The Twitter-using public supposedly voted to let Tr*mp with all his vulgarity, racism, misogyny, infantile vindictiveness and misspellings back on to the social media platform. After the vote came out in Tr*mp’s favour, Musk, with his warped sense of democracy, tweeted about the voice of the people being victorious. Firstly, I’m not so sure about the people really being heard. As I placed my vote, I imagined bots and users with multiple accounts voting en masse. Secondly, Musk is again conflating public debate on social media with a form of truth. John Naughton beat me to the punch on this point in his brilliant commentary on Musk’s flailing with his new ‘plaything.’

I joined Twitter in 2011 at a time when the site had just morphed from a place where people recorded the banalities of their lives in 140 characters (‘I’m now mowing the lawn’) to a forum for academics to share their research. Or so I thought. Reluctant to share work-in-progress, academics and their publishers use Twitter as a stream of billboards advertising published work. Despite that and those three strikes, I’m going to miss Twitter. It does remind my followers that I’m a blogger and draws people into conversation with me. I’m also going to miss Led by Donkeys, J.K. Rowling, a few academic journals, some linguists and yes, Joyce Carol Oates (cats and all). That is, I’ll miss them until they join the mass migration over to Mastodon. You’ll find me there: @paolatrimarco@universeodon.com