For the majority of these works, it felt that the medium of electronic literature was fairly irrelevant. These pieces could have been published through pretty much any medium, and their message would still be relevant. That said, their subject matter is very connected to the concepts of electronic literature; this in and of itself has a potential for importance of the medium, but again the main points that they reference is unaffected. The one piece that stood out to me in particular was “Dakota”. The combination of fast text and sound really emphasized the inflection that the author wanted to impart to the sections that they obviously felt the most connected to. I really liked the speeding up and slowing down of the text on screen, as it emphasized our ability to read at different speeds when presented the text on a moving screen rather than a stationary book. This creates an interconnected relevance to its relationship to electronic literature. It also evokes the speed at which the human mind is capable of understanding text when presented at high speeds. This is actually a technique utilized by speed-readers, the relevance of which I have yet to understand in relation to this work. Perhaps it is a commentary on the speed at which we as readers, viewers and consumers go through online works and consume the pieces of digital work that we encounter on a day to day scale; weather they are Facebook posts, twitter messages, or simply texts, we consume and regurgitate these shorter digital messages at a much quicker rate than that or a literary work or piece of poetry.
Student, Chef, & Amateur Cultist