Panel Statement
Panel: Zones of Contact and Fields of Consistency in Electronic Literature
Stories broadcast in 140 or less characters over the course of a day may, at first, seem only a 21st century update of serialized micro-fiction, yet considering the strategies authors take to produce literary works involving social media, their creations resist easy definition. This paper looks the broad notion of narrative as it plays out in the social networking site, Twitter, in works such as Adam Higgs et al’s “Crushing It: A Social Media Love Story,” Jay Bushman’s “The Good Captain,” and Dene Grigar’s “The 24-Hour Micro-Elit Project.” Specifically, the paper asks two questions: First, how do narratives created for social media sites work against what has become the conventional way to describe e-literature? Second, what do we learn about social media literature if we think about it in terms of non-narrativity? At stake are assumptions about what constitutes electronic literature and conventional views about narrativity in relation to works produced with and for digital media.
- Dene Grigar is an Associate Professor in the Digital Technology & Culture Program at Washington State University Vancouver, CA. Her research focuses in the areas of Emergent Technologies & Cognition, Electronic Literature, and Ephemera. Her book New Worlds, New Words: Exploring Pathways In and About Electronic Environments (with John Barber, Hampton Press, 2001) speculates about the ways in which writing and thinking change when moved to electronic environments, such as the World Wide Web, MOOs, and email. Her second book, Defiance and Decorum: Women, Public Rhetoric, and Activism (with Laura Gray and Kay Robinson) looks at the way women have used Rhetoric to achieve social and political goals. Her specific focus in this book is to examine new media artists and their particular methods of activism. She is also Associate Editor of Leonardo Reviews and Treasurer of the Electronic Literature Organization. In 2001 she attended a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar at UCLA led by N. Katherine Hayles, an experience that led her to undertake, from 2002-4, a post-doctoral study with the Planetary Collegium (formerly the Center of Advanced Inquiry in the Interactive Arts-Science Technology and Art Research, CAiiA-STAR) located at the University of Plymouth, in the UK. Current new media projects include the MINDful Play Environment, an interactive, live game environment that she is creating with Canadian multimedia artist Steve Gibson and Anthologie, a collection of multimedia performance pieces.