new media

Hans Kristian Rustad sympathizes with Curtis White's "latest word." White diagnoses a crisis in contemporary literature in the "Amazonian" monolith dominating the online book industry. Still, Rustad questions White's lack of attention to electronic literature. For Rustad, elit may "save literature from market-oriented book houses that evaluate books by potential profits."

This formulation by Joseph Tabbi is being reprinted with permission from the University of Minnesota Press's remixthebook. The original online version can be found here.

Katherine Wills' anti-interview with Mark Amerika about Internet art.

Janet Murray unriddles the verbal and procedural mix of Interactive Fiction.

Pat Harrigan and Noah Wardrip-Fruin introduce First Person, an interactive, multi-player collaboration between ebr and the MIT Press.

Adrian Miles on themes of print vs. digital, engagement vs. immersion, easy vs. difficult, and affect vs. effect, as they appear in section five of First Person.

Through a close formal analysis of two new critical collections, Paul Benzon ponders the state of media studies as field. Exploring the material and temporal paradoxes of anthologizing new media and posthumanism, he argues that "each of these texts takes shape, succeeds, and fails under the pressures and possibilities posed by the scalar demands of information."

An argument against the collapse of categories by an author who has, yes, himself perpetrated a few codeworks.

Entering the cyberdebates, Scott Rettberg moves beyond technique and proposes a more generative approach to hypertext, in which an author's intention and poetic purpose have a role.