New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories (review)

So fast come the changes in digital technology, and so rapid also are their impact on culture, that the theoretical knowledge of what we do and learn by simply putting things into practice stays inevitably far beyond the practical knowledge of it. The phenomenon of such a gap between the practical and the theoretical, or the instinctive and the categorical, is far from new, and it has been formulated with impressive acuteness by Gertrude Stein in a famous lecture delivered at Amherst College. Taking as its starting point Stein's insights on the fact that "what is seen depends upon how everybody is doing everything," this intelligent and useful volume, brilliantly introduced by Adelaide Morris and carefully edited by herself and Thomas Swiss, makes a more than welcome attempt to bridge the gap between the two forms of knowledge mentioned above.

Today's practice is clearly on the side of Web 2.0, which we continue to call the "interactive" version of the Internet, yet this term is definitely inappropriate to catch what's new in the shift toward newer uses of the Internet and other digital technologies and environments. The notion of interactivity has been put into question by several major theoreticians (the best-known of them being Espen Aarseth) of the "pre"-Web 2.0 applications, and various contributors to New Media Poetics attack it fiercely. However, this collection does not limit itself to denounce the rearview mirror (to follow the metaphor coined by Marshall McLuhan) that helps us to enter the future when we rely too much upon the conceptual tool of interactivity. It introduces also a whole series of alternative concepts that better fit our current practices of digital writing.

Among these concepts, the most salient are obviously those of "experience" and "temporality." The first, experience, aims at broadening the already traditional idea of immersion that is often associated with digital culture. Yet contrary to the idea of immersion, which involves an idea of loss as well as completeness (one enters completely a fictional world, in which to behave as in real life), "experience" hints at a broader range of sensations and thoughts, in which self-reflexivity and the splitting of the self are also present. Also, contrary to the more aesthetic approach of the digital sign as "mobile" and "dynamic" (in comparison with the so-called fixity of signs in print culture), the notion of "temporality" transfers the temporal dynamics to all the features and aspects of digital communication (including the subject itself and his or her making sense of the active shaping of the signs during the digital experience).

New Media Poetics also takes sides in favor of a medium-specific approach to the field, which stands in sharp contrast to the stereotyped ecumenical vision of an overall "multimedia" approach to digital culture of the 1990s. By doing so, the book follows the tendency, launched by Lev Manovich and Katherine Hayles, among others, to avoid fashionable discourses on post-medium hybridization and to foreground instead the multiple forces that reshape medium-specificity in the digital age. Hayles's ideas on "technotextuality" (i.e. the basic stance that the text is a material object molded by the formal characteristics of its carrier and communicational context) are here rightly passed on to new media poetry.

New Media Poetics offers the best currently available overview of poetry in the new media age (it continues thus the groundbreaking work on poetry and media by Marjorie Perloff and Katherine Hayles, both present in this book). In addition, it also makes room for authors who are deeply committed to digital writing themselves (I am thinking here of authors such as Kenneth Goldsmith, Talan Memmott and John Cayley). Such a move is extremely valuable. First, it helps to correct the too-rapidly institutionalized canon of the first-generation digital works: thanks to books like this...