Eng. 335-01 Reflection #2

This week’s readings did not really jump out at me. There were some very original concepts that were attempted, such as Deena Larsen’s “Carving in Possibilities” and Ingrid Ankerson and Megan Sapnar’s “Cruising”, but I did not find their narrative to be particularly interesting. For concepts on writing, Stephanie Strickland’s “Born Digital” was far more enriching, but even to that extent I did not find it to be particularly mind-altering. Her definitions of E-poetry come across as fairly basic concepts, and some of which is contradictory. Her concept that “if it could possibly be printed out, it isn’t e-lit” (Strickland, 1) makes any form of electronic literature an impossibility. Even works that utilize different mediums such as film, flash or music can still be printed and re-created in a non-digital sense, making them not E-literature. Additionally, I disagree on principal on her concept that “E-lit is a result of feedback processes between humans and machines, between human intelligence and machine intelligence” (Strickland, 9). All forms of literature, in my personal way of thinking, is an interaction between one person to another. While yes, there is the technological aspect and medium of E-literature, the original work was still written, programmed, or coded by a person. Unless the work is born from a machine itself, with no human origin, then Strickland’s concept is flawed. The idea that the author “cannot, even in principle, control the execution or processing of those lines of code. That job is done by the processor of the original machine, by an unpredictable series of computations” (Strickland, 9) is inherently incorrect. Computers, by design, are logical and predictable. If one was to write a line of code, the program one writes it for would execute that line of code as you wrote it, following a set line of rules. If computers and programs are as unpredictable as she is claiming that they are, they would have no practical function in our day to day life.