Luesebrink & Strickland: Stephanie Boluk places us “amidst [a] tempestuous and contestatory media ecology.” The terms “digital” and “electronic” begin to seem to her, and others, outdated, co-opted, or past their prime in terms of rhetorical usefulness. Ian Hatcher finds them too constraining. They should not be used to label technology-aware writing practices if they establish a Procrustean category (folder) as opposed to being one descriptor among others (tag). […]See the full commentary

Luesebrink & Strickland: We fully endorse Boluk’s view of what ELO does, investigating on every level investments that accompany toolsets and language, and in fact language as toolset. We also find ELO vested in learning how to read the nonhuman history of inscriptions in emerging genres and platforms. We believe that using the term “digital” with humanities, as at DHSI, or “electronic” with literature, in an MLA context, in fact permits just such an investigation. “Humanities” and “literature” themselves must change, and they are after all terms of recent vintage compared to very old conc… continue

Luesebrink & Strickland: If for Samantha Gorman ELO risks collapsing by virtue of irrelevance, and she would like us, therefore, to develop a distinctive contemporary “brand,” for Bishop we risk collapsing under our own weight and the undisciplined variety of work we support. He would like to see us disappear, assimilate, in regularized fashion back into the field from which he feels we came, namely literature. Apart from the fact that people in e-lit come from net.art, gaming, design, computer science and other fields in addition to literature, we note that the ELO’s efforts to become a r… continue

Luesebrink & Strickland: In almost complete contrast to Samantha Gorman, Donato would like us to look not toward those farther out on the technological-innovation curve, but those farther back, those on the other side of the digital divide. We cannot emphasize enough that we endorse this goal but must also confess that ELO has not found a realistic way to implement it. We do have a Standing Committee for Outreach on which we invite all interested members to serve. […]See the full commentary

Luesebrink & Strickland: Samantha Gorman, teaching at Rhode Island School of Design, was struck by the generational gap between herself and her students and the much wider gap between her students and older work collected by ELO. […] Gorman analyzes a form of generational aesthetics—as did Florian Cramer in his keynote for the 2012 ELO Conference—that is connected with advertising and the commercial. In order to remain engaged in “developing bodies and new blood: both in terms of evolving approaches and in terms of numbers” she advises looking to our “brand” and looking beyond any idea o… continue