Cyborg Imagination in the Age of Electronic Incunabula :: Research Essays Term Papers

Cyborg Imagination in the Age of Electronic IncunabulaIn small town on the Holodeck, Janet Murray argues that we live in an old age of electronic incubabula. Noting that it took fifty age after the invention of the printing press to establish the conventions of the printed book, she writes, The garish videogames and tortuous Web sites of the current digital environment are part of a similar period of technical evolution, part of a similar attempt for the conventions of coherent communication (28). Although I disagree in various slipway with her vision of where electronic narrative is going, it does seem likely that in twenty historic period, or fifty, certain things will be obvious about electronic narrative that those of us who are working in the field at present simply do not see. Alongside the obvious drawbacks--forget marble and luxuriant monuments, it would be nice for a work to outlast the average Yugo--are around advantages, not the least of which is what Michael Joy ce calls the momentary advantage of our awkwardness we have an probability to see our interactions with electronic media before they become as transparent as our interactions with print media have become. The particular interaction I want to understand at today is the interaction of technology and imagination. If computer media do nobody else, they surely offer the imagination new opportunities indeed, the past ten years of electronic writing has been an era of extraordinary technical innovation. Yet this is also, again, an age of incubabula, of awkwardness. My question today is, what can we say about this awkwardness, insofar as it pertains to the interaction of technology and the imagination?Let me begin with a justification Im a technodummy. By dummy I mean the kind of soulfulness targeted by books such as IDG Books HTML for Dummies, Javascript for Dummies, and C++ for Dummies. I plug-in that the series has extended past the technical fields there is right off a Dieting f or Dummies, an Entertaining for Dummies, and so forth. There is not further a dating for Dummies but also an ABRIDGED version of Dating for Dummies, which I guess is for people who want to skip the movie. There is dismantle a book put out by Alpha Books called The murder Idiots Guide to Enhancing Self-Esteem, which seems to me to be carrying the concept a bit far. Anyway, I scab that, although Ive never bought a for Dummies book, I am one of the people such books are written for, a technodummy, which is to say someone who isnt exceptionally happy in using computers.